Colosseum - Quarterfinal - Okor vs the Bandit

[Storyteller]

The plague marine paid just a moment of his time to the outdated relics in the crate behind him. The human insignia and their weapons meant little to him.

On the other side of the battle zone, the bandit smirked as she looked at the collection of archaic axes and assorted stabbing implements in the chest. The flag that ruffled in the breeze had some cool sort of tribal logo on it that she didn't recognize. After making a mental note about what she liked from the box, the woman turned and squinted to see across the little replica city. Her eyes rested on her opponent, and she didn't know whether to scowl or grin at the monstrosity.

Somewhere, the gong sounded.

Judge – Gildarts and Dark Link

Bandit posts first and may do so at anytime after 1 PM CST.

Description of fight area and other information can be found here - <!-- l --><a class="postlink-local" href="http://omniverse-rpg.com/viewtopic.php?p=50443#p50443">viewtopic.php?p=50443#p50443</a><!-- l -->

Please refer any questions to that thread.

Word Limit: 750
Posts: 3
Time Limit: 48 hours
SP use is enabled. SP does not regenerate between rounds. Injuries may occur. Neither injuries nor SP use are factored into judgment, only the quality of writing

[Bandit With No Name]

She took a long, deep breath, and patted down her still-filthy shirt. Dust and grit puffed out, and she waved it away from her face. It didn’t seem to matter how many times she’d put it back together, remaking the garment out of bullet holes and blood stains, there was always a bit of sand in it. It was part of how she saw herself; part of who she was. Just like the long, bloody streak that ran down her chest. Her finger mindlessly played with the hole where Roland had almost killed her, and where that red bastard actually did.

The past was her religion. Pains suffered, difficulties overcome. The bullet that still rested in her chest, the metal arm, and now a quaint yellow ribbon; all were monuments to the past and a promise to the future.

Running his gauntleted hand over the blackened surface of a skull, Okor too paid homage to his religion. Twisted prayer gurgled from his fetid lips, resonating from within his helm. Only after his dark consecration was completed did he lift his gaze to the woman perched on a faraway structure, Zul-Jin’s banner fluttering behind her.

The gruesomely polished trophy fell to the plague-marines belt and a single, heavy, footfall broke their reverie.

The bandit snatched a long spear from the rack, twirling it into her hand and cocking it back. She stepped forward twice and lobbed the weapon as hard as she could, stumbling to her knees after it left her fingertips. The shaft soared over the field, the feathers and baubles whistling as it cut through the air. The spear entered the traitor’s body with the crack of his armor and a wet slorp, the tribal weapon burying itself halfway up the haft.

The raider grinned, pumping her fist in celebration of her shot. That is until she noticed that the wretched titan of jangling steel was still walking towards her. Scowling, she removed another spear from the rack and sent it along the same trajectory.

Crack. Slorp. He lumbered forward, heedless.

Another. Still, he marched. Another. Unfaltering, dauntless.

Inevitable.

He had made it halfway across the “city” and she could now see the swirling aura of flies that surrounded him. She squinted as the doddering ancient plucked one of the shafts from his chest and tossed aside, allowing him to retrieve his bolter unimpeded.

“Come, I have such wonderful…” his voice burbled, pausing to take a rattling breath, “… gifts to share with you.”

Pursing her lips in frustration, the skull-faced woman pulled the massive hammer from the straps that held it on her back and cranked on the throttle, flames spitting from the exhaust. “I got something for you too, pal,” she shouted from the top of the building, looking down upon him. “Come and get some, punk-ass.”

“Ah,” he rasped, “the impertinence…” again he was forced to pause and suck down another sickly breath, “of youth.”

Slowly he brought his weapon to his shoulder, the remaining three spears still jutting from his torso at odd and unsettling angles. The bandit made note of the eerie green light that shined from within, glinting from the strings of teeth that drooped from its exterior. She leapt from the rooftop to an adjacent building just as the bolter vomited a fist-sized round, screaming past by mere feet. When the shot bit into the stone beside her, it detonated and cast steel splinters in every direction. Tiny shards of the projectile peppered the woman’s flank, though it was barely more than a sting.

The thatch roof sagged dangerously as she rolled overtop it, and one of the boughs snapped when she sprang off of it into the air. A shadow loomed over the plague marine and he ponderously turned his gaze skyward, just in time to see the maul meet his brow. A plume of flames engulfed him and, for the first time, he staggered.

Instantly the bandit’s senses were assaulted by the heretic’s presence. With every movement he made a new whiff of his abominable odor came forth. Some horrid fluid seeped from between the joints of his armor, itself seeming plagued by time and rust. Every aspect of the warrior told a story of not just illness, but rot.

“Sweet Omni and all of his ass-fucking angels, what is wrong with you?” she balked, waving her hand in front of her nose.

“I have only embraced…” he groaned, thick layers of mucus drowning his words, “… the inexorable.”

750 words

[Okor]

Chuckling as he rose to his feet, the Plague Marine ran his red eye over the foe, analyzing the minute details of her posture, her musculature, and most importantly, the oversized mallet rumbling in her ebony hands. Their stance was lax, indicative of a distinct lack of discipline. While normally this would be a boon, the fact that his horn had been broken off was a testament to their power. "No, seriously. What in Diablo's Fiery Fuck-pits is wrong with you?" Prompted the woman, hefting their hammer for another crushing blow. "Want a... List?" Joked the pestilential giant, swinging his oxidized weapon at her unarmoured thigh. They sprang up at the final moment, ungainly falling to the side as their hammer clattered to the cobblestones. Snarling, Okor stood, his blade lodged in the leg of a market stall. A string of expletives streamed from the bandit's painted mouth as she scrabbled across the cobblestones, dragging her hammer into one of the back alleys that suffused the arena. Tearing his trusted weapon from its prison of wood, he shambled after his elusive foe, the sound of her footsteps long gone. He snapped the spear shafts protruding from his torso as he mulled over recent events. Why would they run? This was the culmination of dozens of battles, a slaughter that had drawn hundreds, if not thousands to watch. Would they throw away all the glory, all the power they had garnered up to this point? Were all the people of this round cowards, despite their infinite power? How pa-

His silent haranguing of the entire Omniverse was interrupted as a door splintered to his left, a steel boot blowing it apart. The woman leveled an unfamiliar weapon at him, a manic grin plastering itself across her painted face matching the skull hanging on Okor's armoured hip. She screamed out a warcry, the meaning of which was unknown to Nurgle's Chosen: "Garbage Day, bitch!" An arc of crimson energy burnt through his corroded breastplate, incinerated the pallid flesh beneath, and scorched the stone wall behind him. He looked down at the charred crater in his chest, putrid black smoke rising from the hole where his heart once was.

There was a brief pause as the two stared at the vast anatomical damage that had been done. While Okor was curious to see how long it would take for his gifts to heal him, a reminder of Nurgle's pervasive touch, the Bandit was merely waiting for her opponent to collapse after her killing blow. To her surprise, the gangrenous giant propelled his malformed skull forward, cracking it against her comparatively fragile face, a spray of blood and bone rewarding him for his efforts as her nose broke under his assault. Thinking far quicker than the lethargic legionnaire could react, the raider rolled to the side, narrowly dodging a heavy fist that pulverized the door frame.

The warrior glared at him from a crude pair of iron sights, crackling coronas of energy arcing from their weapon. "Shot you through the damn heart. The underverse does it take to put you down?" They spat, blood streaming from the ruins of their nose, crimson staining the stark white warpaint. "Speaking from... experience, two high-explosive rockets at short range, amputation and... the removal of my jaw." Laughed Okor, lifting his bolter to the slowly regenerating chasm in his chest. "Shi-"

The howl of the bolter cut off the rest of her sentence, a shell borne aloft on flame screaming past her ear. "Fu-" She twisted past another death-dealing missile. "Omni dam-" A spray of dust and fragments pelted her from behind as another round detonated against the masonry. "Motherf-" She ducked underneath the wild swing of the marine, the stock of his bolter flying over the tangled hair atop her skull. "Assbu-" She clumsily leaped over a leg swipe, a hunk of rusted metal barely missing her cloth-clad calf.

The two paused for a moment, staring at the environmental devastation wrought by Okor's misguided attacks. "One eye's a bitch for depth perception, huh?" Joked the painted warrior, dried blood adorning her pale facade. His corroded gauntlet went to the blade on his hip. "It can be a... challenge at times." He admitted, beginning to draw his pestilent weapon free, murmuring dark benedictions under his toxic breath. Foul effluence ran along its length, as he swung it in a diagonal slash towards the foe's face.

737 words according to wordcounter.net

[Bandit With No Name]

The filth-encrusted blade danced over the surface of her light armor before it bit into the exposed flesh below her collarbone. The rusted blade more hacked than cut and the wound’s ragged edges became packed deep with effluence. The wound was more shallow than the pestilent champion had intended, but he still grinned as the woman doubled over in pain.

Okor lifted his blade, ready to cleave into his prey once again, his breath wheezing with excitement. Her dreads whipped as she lifted her head, a wild look of ferocity etched into her features. She jerked up the haft of the oversized mallet, and his attack skittered off of it with the yelp of steel-on-steel and a shower of sparks. Stepping forward, she drove her heel into his monstrous gut, cracking the ceramite and forcing him backwards.

As the lumbering plague-lord stomped back into range, the woman flicked her hand forward, a bright yellow ribbon unraveling from her forearm. The magical bond snapped around the traitor’s wrist, an adorable bow topping off the painfully tight constrictor. Okor paused and looked down at the glowing piece of fabric, unsure what exactly the leash was meant to do. The raider wrapped the ribbon into both hands, snorted, and torqued her entire body, fully yanking the chaos marine from his feet and onto his face.

His sword clattered over the cobblestone, and she kicked it away beneath a nearby spice stall. The magical bond quickly uncoiled and returned to her arm, and she took a few leisurely steps forward. Smirking, she pulled her rifle from her shoulder strap and leveled it at the back of the marine’s helmeted head. “Let’s see about that broken jaw you were talking about,” she mocked through a sneer, her finger toying with the trigger.

Then it hit. A wave of nausea and disequilibrium shook her to the core, her legs instantly stumbling as the world spun around her. She slammed into a nearby building, blinking hard in an attempt to clear the illness from her eyes. She looked down and boils had already begun to form around the shallow gash in her chest.

Her vision wobbled and jerked as he saw the twisted king of filth slowly push himself to his feet, a puddle of muck left below him. She weakly struggled as his massive body moved in upon hers, and he snatched her up by the throat. Gagging, the woman’s eyes opened wide, red veins creeping in from the corners. She bared her teeth, spittle frothing forth as she struggled for air.

She was overwhelmed with his stench. All that she could hear was the buzz of the flies that crept over her skin and hair. All that she could see was rot. Her every sense burned in his presence.

“Relish in the suffering…” he groaned while she feebly thrashed against him, “… that Grandfather endows upon us.”

As darkness began to creep upon her, she wound her metallic arm backwards and it was enshrouded with shimmering white energy. With every ounce of strength she could muster, she swung a cannonball haymaker into the plague marine’s helm, Gildart’s stolen Crash Magic flashing into a bright grid across the metal. Hundreds of tiny cubes exploded from around his head, a shower of deconstructed debris spraying throughout the streets.

The woman fell to the ground, coughing and choking as Okor stumbled backwards until he crashed through a nearby display of previously fresh fruit. Sucking down a gulp of air, the bandit noticed that the stench had somehow intensified. Looking to the now bare-headed foe, she immediately turned her head and evacuated the hot dog and three beers she’d had for lunch.

The man’s flesh was a horror to behold, twisting maggots crawling through it, black teeth, and an eye socket so overwhelmingly consumed by decay that it was little more than a puss-filled crater. “Alright, she gasped, “Yeah I think I’m done with this shit.”

Pressing her hand into her side, a bright white light shined from within her, gently pushing the irradiated shards of his bolter rounds from her side. She took a deep breath, pushed her woozy legs out from beneath her, and lifted her rifle.

Okor rolled to his side and awkwardly toddled his way back into the fray, only for a beam to scorch into the grotesque juggernaut’s shoulder, then another into his gut. The ancient plating of his armor crumbled, revealing more of his wretched body beneath. She didn't stop.

746 words.

[Okor]

A vermillion streak scorched across the marine’s exposed face, flesh and skin turning to ash in its wake. His opponent was far stronger than he had anticipated. While the skull hung by his hip was immensely powerful, they were all showmanship, a mere clown endowed with a proclivity towards battle. There was no such theatricality here, nothing more than pure and simple violence. A woman after my own hearts. His blessed flesh faltered under her onslaught, parasites that had walked with him for centuries annihilated. Another laser carved across his breastplate, melting the surface of ceramite older than some worlds, the wielder of the damnable weapon cursing and shouting at the paladin of plague. ”Enough.”[b] Spat Okor, the tendons in his jaw clearly visible and burnt, their blackness matching the infectious abyss of his mouth. His pistol howled, a corroded shell falling to the stone as he advanced forward. “God-ass-mother-shit-dammit!” Came the cry as phosphex adhered itself to her fleshy forearm, the unfamiliar las-weapon dropping from her hands as she recoiled in pain.

The green flames of the alchemical inferno died away, leaving the woman gasping in pain as she clutched her ravaged limb. [b]”You still resist his embrace.” He gurgled, gesturing with a singed claw towards the ragged gash on her torso, blackened veins pulsing with every gradually slowing beat of her heart. “F-fuck you, you Omni-damned bastard.” She stammered, the poison spreading through her veins, sapping her essence. Booming laughter emanated from the disgusting maw set in the ravaged face of the plague marine. ”He’s already within… you. Every spasm of your heart spreads his touch further.” He took a step closer to the disarmed woman, a maggot burrowing out from his necrotized face, pushing aside charred flesh in its endless hunger. ”Don’t you want… this?” The response he got was a derisive laugh, echoing around the narrow streets. “Why the f-flying fuck would I want your nasty-ass necrosis?”

”Can you not see the… signs? A storm is coming. Bread and… circuses, to distract the masses, take their eyes off of the building cataclysm.” He paused for a breath, clean air entering his lungs, and crying out in a silent scream as innumerable pathogens ravaged its slim hopes for purity. ”These people are soft. Weak. They shall be… swept away, unable to protect themselves. They barely survived the last crisis, and they have only grown weaker since then. When the storm breaks, who will… stand with the kingdom? Perhaps 3 of our number. The secondaries are feeble, mortal, finite. Our most… precious resource, and yet discarded like spent ammunition. The people do not need a hero, storming out of the mists to rescue them from the weekly monster. I offer them… salvation.” The monster rasped, rotten tongue slapping against jagged, broken splinters of teeth. He extended an emaciated claw, wriggling parasites barely visible underneath jaundiced skin. ”I offer them security. I offer them unity. I offer them equality. I offer them… Immortality. They do not need to suffer. You do not need to suffer any longer. Together, we can save this world from its eternal stasis. No more hurt. No more… pain. Just his embrace.”

His single eye blinked, pus encrusting its diseased lid. His devotional tabard flapped in the slight breeze, the sigil emblazoned upon it seeming to pulse in time with the bandit’s heatbeat, resonating with the maladies afflicting her. ”You no longer need to walk alone, Warrior. Join with… us. Accept your death, and you will find it will never come. An eternity to raise hell, to make this realm… right. To make its people safe, to elevate them.” Her eyes, becoming tinged with fever, darted around, glancing at her fallen weapon, the vulnerable form of her opponent, and the simple rune that called out to her, whispered promises and affirmations of adoration to her corrupted blood. ”All you need to do… Is let go. Rot, and be reborn. Spread his blessings, taint the wells, save the… world.” He stopped, the cyclopean eye set in the center of his mutated skull watching the spread of disease in the bandit’s body with interest. The pathogen’s efforts were stymied, halted by her impressive physique. If she would only stop fighting…

704 words.

[Bandit With No Name]

The bandit was going to die.

She had felt the chill hand of death, and she remembered its caress more clearly than any other. The fever that carved at her bones. The tremors that rushed over her spine. The dull ache that pounded over her entire body, accentuated by the sharp twangs of agony that drove into her, like railroad spikes left in the desert heat.

Her vision warped and bent like air over the dunes, and once again she felt hateful eye of the sun upon her. Blood pounded in her ears and her fingers wandered to the ragged hole that had been torn in her chest. “You have forgotten the face of your father,” she heard him say, Roland’s rough voice distorted by her delirium. She heard the timpani of her heart gently dull in its pounding, the rhythm slowing more and more until the darkness devoured her.

It was still in the inky blackness that surrounded her. Still and calm. There was no pain here, no need to snatch at the hopeless strands of survival. Her struggles drifted from memory, her scars fading into the shadows. She was stripped of her agony until there was nothing left. Here, it was peaceful.

She hated it.

Fresh rage billowed up from her gut, surging through her, willing her fragile body to move. She urged her numb fingers, demanded action of her stiffening limbs. She defied that stillness which she so wholly despised and opened her eyes once again.

The bandit was going to die. But not yet.

“Let go?” she croaked, her quivering hand sliding into the dirt, grasping at the very earth itself. She shook as she rolled to the side and even as she felt his bolter being leveled at her, she heaved herself up to her knees. “I don’t think I can,” she confessed, watching the soil slide between her fingers.

She laughed gently to herself, ignoring the man that would like be her executioner. “You’re made, by a Prime, or a God, or plain old birth.” The dirt ran out of her palm, and the last pebble tumbled to the ground. “Then you die. Maybe of old age, maybe a bullet to the brain, maybe cause some weirdo with a fetish for venereal diseases bashes your skull in.”

Shaking her head, she winced and staggered to her feet. “One day, the sun will fall from its string. The sky will shatter. The wind will blow away the last grain of sand. Everything ends. Everything dies. Even Primes.” She grinned to herself, even as the admittance fell from her lips, “Even me.”

Her sweaty palms curled into fists, and her bleary brown eyes met his. “Even you.”

The bolter cracked, the wood of a nearby stand splintering into hundreds of shards down the street. The warrior stepped wide as the pistol made a broad arc to chase her. She pounced forward as another round flew wide, slamming into the purulent gladiator at the waist. The two crashed into the ground with the clamor of their mingling armor. With the groan of bending steel, she ripped herself free and postured up, then smashed back down upon him with a heavy elbow to the chin.

“You think that they need to be saved from pain?” she balked, winding back up or another hit, “Life is pain.” She fist hammered down into the spongy, overripe tissue beneath. The heretic fumbled to regain a dominant position, his swollen fingers wrapping around wrist. Her steel crushed into his, prying it away. Ripping her own shirt away, she exposed her etched flesh beneath. Beyond all reason, she pushed his fingers into the wind scarification. “Do you feel that?” she growled, the sound of his bones breaking crackling as she slid it over her ribs, “Those are my scars. I earned every one of them.”

The marine slid his slimy hand away, pushing on her face. “We’re born, we die!” she screamed between his fingers.

As her strength faltered, allowing him to press his pistol into her cheek but before he could pull the trigger, she snarled and turned her face, bared her teeth, and snapped down harshly on his index finger. The bolter fired in her ear, joyously deafening her to the sound of the joint snapping clean through.

She spit out the wormy extremity, blackened blood rolling down her chin as she stared into the corpulent corpse-god. “Everything in-between is suffering.

“Without it, you’re just another dead man.”

749 words

[Okor]

Booming laughter flowed from the desecrated abyss of the ancient warrior’s shattered jaw, splintered remnants of teeth joining the corrosive spittle seeping from his ravaged maw. His stomach split, flesh and skin tearing itself apart to reveal ever-hungry teeth, eagerly sinking yellowed fangs into the scarred flesh of the bandit, rending calloused skin in an uncontrolled frenzy of long-repressed hunger. Winding tendrils of a digestive system no longer able to be sustained on anything save the capricious eddies of the immaterium ensnared her hardened limbs, pulling her deeper into his ravenous chasm. She sunk deeper and deeper into the abyss into which all ends, to be consumed and reprocessed, remade in a form more pleasing to the Lord of All.

And then, she broke her fetters.

Ragged remnants of entrails fell from her muscled frame, grinning as the fever began to enter her eyes, streaks and flecks of her own infected vitae infiltrating her vitreous humours. She cocked back a bloodied fist, preparing to drive it into the eternally grinning visage of the plague marine. It did so, careening into his rotten face, a wet squelch emanating from the impact. Putrescent slime dripped from her fist, new bloody momentos carved upon it by the unyielding stone beneath the liquified form of Okor.

Blow upon blow rained down upon his gelatinous frame, splintering the cobbles beneath, fragments of pavement embedding themselves in her worn knuckles. In her frenzy born of a myriad of maladies assailing her mind, she continued her assault, oblivious to the slow slithering of the chosen’s effluent mass, his pestilential matter slowly accumulating behind her.

As the last of his corporeal form slid into place, the bandit turned, snarling through foam-flecked lips at the sudden repositioning of her hatred’s focus. With one of the last few bursts of speed her ravaged body possessed, her powerful hands wrested a weapon from the nearby market stall, turning a supportive pillar into a pointed stake.

Surging forward, accompanied by a savage cry, a roar of defiance of all that Okor and his patron embodied, they plunged their makeshift weapon down towards the gap between his battered gorget, and his equally damaged flesh.

The multi-dimensional rainbow of Omnillium he held in his hand quickly tarnished and broke, falling apart as it dripped with noxious effluence, becoming nothing more than a twisted point dripping with filth. It was perfect. The blade rose upwards towards the raised morass of scars adorning her abdomen, its tip resplendent with diseases so potent, any mortal sickness would scream in dim terror as they fell upon it, tearing them apart in a microscopic orgy of destruction.

Their two disparate blows connected. Splintered wood tore into the plague marine’s throat, ripping apart his esophagus, scratching his reinforced spinal column as it twisted and turned, rending and ripping infected flesh in its quest for death. At the same instant, a septic dagger plunged into her gut, its toxic payload spreading into her already-corrupted bloodstream, while the savage construction of the weapon itself embedded itself in her entrails. They stood there in a shared embrace of impalement, the constant worrying of her makeshift weapon nullifying his rampant regeneration.

The necrotic knight leaned in, translucent blood slowly seeping from his ragged lips, and the wound carved in his neck, adhering to his short protrusion of facial hair. A stench like the primordial swamps of ancient Terra, ridden with the dead and decaying, yet suffused with life, emanated from the abomination that could only tangentially be called a mouth.

”You still fight.” He rasped, the instrument of murder obstructing his trachea no more an impediment than the cysts and phlegm his voice forced its way through routinely. ”His essence… suffuses you. You say that life is struggle? That it is pain?” His chuckle was stilled by the pointed obstruction, emerging as a hacking, bloody cough. ”What you suffer is what I… survive every moment. Every torment inflicted upon the faithful is insubstantial, for.. Grandfather shields us. We rot so that their blades can no longer hurt us.”

He twisted the crooked blade, causing blood to begin to seep from the abdominal incision created by the shiv, partially translucent vitae falling to the cracked stones beneath. ”Of all the things this cracked and broken… realm can throw at you, there is only one thing you need to accept.

Let him help you.”

Used Tier one supermove: Septic Shiv. 1 SP remaining.

[Bandit With No Name]

The woman’s blood actively curdled as it fell from her belly, landing in thick globules on the pavement below. She didn’t bother struggling for breath, knowing that her diaphragm was already giving way to the necrosis that suffused every cavity of her war-ravaged body. The sickness had already won.

Grunting, the woman jerked her makeshift shiv to the side, the wood collapsing down on his trachea and putting an end to his undaunted sermon of decay.

“Shut the…” she rasped, searching for air, “fuck up.”

Translucent bubbles gurgled from his mouth, his mouth still miming the words of his prayer. The chaos that animated his form would not relent. The plague that the Grandfather had gifted upon him stitched his wounds, death sadly unable to keep pace with the Rotting God’s blessings.

The jagged edge of the blade jerked within her, his sputtering movements bringing the rusted blade through her viscera. Her feet went cold only moments before they seemed to fade away, the tingling numbness of paralysis creeping up her trunk. And yet, she clung to life.

Her right hand left the wooden shard and she cocked it back, her trembling fingers making a limp fist. What was left of her breath was pushed in to one final scream, though her newfound phlegm and rot strangled most of it into little more than a whimper. “I don’t need…” she managed before trailing away.

The fury of her strike did not diminish as quickly as her words however, and the marine’s skull split along the sutures where her knuckles connected. A spray of pale fluid splattered out in a glorious display of violence, and the thing which was once a man tumbled over. Her metallic fingers yet clung to the barb that she had planted within him, so she hit the ground along with him.

Laying limply on the fiend’s chest, sweaty and sore, her hateful eyes bore into the chasm she had created on the side of his face. No longer capable of lifting herself with her frozen back muscles, she instead used the wooden spike to posture up for another blow. Flesh met flesh, and both combatants were instantly drenched in that substance which Okor called his blood, thick chunks of his skull pushed down into his brain along with her fist.

The tattered mass that was once the plague marine’s head lay unmoving, his cursed lips finally still. She pried her hand from the crater she had leveled into his head, and the structure wobbled and deflated grotesquely, bits of grey matter dripping from between her digits. The blade that had been sunken into her gut slowly dissolved, though the maladies it had imposed upon her remained.

She allowed herself the privilege of inhaling, though it took every ounce of her will to take in even just a whisper of oxygen. She no longer heard the crowd, though she had stopped listening to them long before. All her ears yearned to hear was a voice telling her that it was over; somebody to tell her that help was on its way.

She managed only to pull herself away from the creature’s body before she became vaguely aware that her mechanical arm had ceased in responding to her commands, a quick glance revealing that her body had begun to reject it in her enfeebled state.

She couldn’t even manage a swear, and instead scornfully latched her hand upon the trophy that dangled on Okor’s waist. “That’s…” she wheezed, “mine now.” She pulled the darkened skull off of his belt, snapped the rope that had held it in place.

Not knowing what more to do with it, she clutched it upon her chest with the only limb she retained agency over, and stared up into the sky.

It was not much longer until the magical barrier that surrounded the field fell, and the sound of heavy footfalls surrounded her. She didn’t move her head to notice who had come for her, and only saw the Kingdom’s medical insignia when they stooped down to push a finger into her throat to check her pulse.

The medic began to count her thread heartbeat, and a slow look of consternation crossed his face. The shrieks of his comrades filled the air before his own did, the pestilence that Nurgle had bequeathed upon the bandit now streaking up over his own flesh. “Do not touch her!” he howled in his dying moments, “The illness will only spread!”

Groaning, the bandit finally turned her bloodshot eyes from the clouds, staring with dispassion and displeasure as her only chance of survival crumpled into the street beside her. “Mother fu…” she trailed away, unable to continue her speech. Giving her head a gentle shake, she sighed and conceited herself to the Fountain, knowing that it was far too late for recovery.

-----

When she awoke, a darkly robed creature loomed over her, tiny, glassy eyes staring upon her from behind its massive hooked beak.

The marauder’s heavy hand quickly snapped the leather cuff that presumed to restrain her and landed on the being’s cheek, sending him flying across the room. Panting heavily, she tried her other arm, though it still refused to move for her. Instead, she reached across her body and yanked the other chain from her metallic wrist and sat up.

“Where the fuck am I!?” she demanded, her voice echoing in the strange emptiness of eternity that stretched in all directions around her.

Correcting his hat, the medieval plague-doctor slowly brought himself to his feet and readjusted his mask. He took a deep breath from his elongated herb pouch in the beak that poked out in front of his face and exhaled. “You are in quarantine,” he said quite calmly, a thick old-world accent tainting his voice. “Yourself and your opponent are both quite contagious in your current states.”

Shaking her head, she tried to wrap her head around what had happened. “Wait, I’m not dead?”

The doctor shook his head, “No, though we feared you might if not given enough time to recover. Our Lord has given us this Isolation Verse to slow the passing of time and tend to your injuries for that reason. You should have several more weeks to convalesce.”

“Several more?” She groaned, and threw herself back into her sweat-drenched pillow.

“It’s amazing that you managed to recover at all. We could do nothing for you, it seemed, and it seemed that you had given in to your death.” He shrugged, collecting thick sheets of parchment from the floor, scribbled with his manic notes, “Until you had given yourself to the glory of Our God, it seemed hopeless.”

She ran her hand through her thick dreads and furrowed her eyebrows. “Until I had given in, huh…” she allowed the thought to trail away, almost repulsed at its implications. Her eyes snapped up as another realization struck her, “Wait, he’s alive too?!”

The doctor’s expression was inscrutable behind the dark lenses of his glasses, but his voice was pained as he confirmed, “Yes. The plague-bearer yet lives.”

“HOW IN THE FUCK,” she shouted, more an exclamation than a question. “I punched his fucking brains out! I literally punched his fucking brains out!”

“Perhaps it is your foul tongue that slows the healing will of God,” the man of ‘medicine’ scolded. “In any case, enjoy your rest. None of the other competitors will have such leisure time.”

The bandit sighed, looking around her bed into the blank canvas that sprawled in every direction. “So uh,” she said flatly, “what do I do to burn some time around here?”

The doctor motioned towards a small night stand on the side of the bed opposite herself. “I have left you something to read.” He quickly shuffled through his papers once more and nodded, “I will be back to check on you soon. Rest well, warrior.” With that, he turned, vanishing through the white and out of the isolation.

Grunting, the bandit managed to shimmy her way to the drawer that rested in the night-stand, pulling it open. She snatched up the leather-bound tome that rest within, its cover unadorned with a title. She smiled to herself at its pristine appearance. She had never had any good books in the Dunes.

She settled into a propped-up position and flipped it open, almost giddy with excitement. As soon as she read the first page she groaned, her head dropping back in crestfallen disappointment. “Fuckin figures,” she swore and tossed it into the emptiness.

“I’ve had enough lectures for one day,” she spat, searching her pockets for her dataverse device.