Omi Barsait vs. Rook

BLOODY TRENCHES

One one of Gaia's many forgotten battlefields, two armies carved out their campaigns into the earth beneath their feet and laid waste to one another. The conflict and those who forgot it have faded into the mists of Gaia's history, but the scars remain: long, deep gouges dug into the earth, and stretches of flattened, gray wastes.

Terrain

General: The fighting area is a long stretch of trench, approximately 100' from end to end. The trench itself is eight feet deep and approximately 12 feet across from inner wall to inner wall. The walls are bare, hard-packed dirt, and the floor is made up of wooden slats. There is a 1-meter deep, ramped alcove every three meters, once used by sharp-shooters to catch scouts across No Man's Land, which participants can use to get out of the trench more easily.

Weapons: Weapons are common in the trenches. Rusted entrenching tools, bayonets, and empty rifles and pistols can be found half-buried in the muddied floor.

Bonus Features: The Ring-Out Count has been double from TEN to TWENTY in order to allow fighters to leave and enter the trench for repositioning purposes.

(Open to spectators.)

Haelikor

MelonusHead

A masked man lying on the grass above the trench jolted upright as the sound of some sort of heavy impact with dirt reached his ears. He looked around, and seeing nothing immediately heading towards him, he brushed the husk of a mango off his chest and rolled over to bring his head level with the side of the trench. The black metal covering his face gave him an oddly robotic appearance as he leaned over and looked down the trench below him, until his eyes were met with the equally odd sight of a vomiting jester riding a handle-less Segway about fifty feet down.

“Well, would you look at that then,” Rook muttered, having missed the more spectacular aspect of the court jester’s arrival, and only caught his abrupt upchucking. Rook had been waiting for another of those announcements to tell him to get to work, as these things had an oddly lax ruling for the start of combat. Apparently, he wasn’t getting one this time around. Yet his foe had arrived, so it was time to get to work none the less.

Rook rolled back over to grab his shield where it was stuck sideways in the earth, strapping it to his left arm, and then threw himself back over the other way again until his body weight carried him over the side of the trench. He swung his legs around as he fell and bent his knees to withstand the impact of his heavily armoured form dropping to the earth, and he too landed with a sizable thump. The first thing he did was turn appropriately to look over at Omi, presenting his shield towards him. The Rook emblem on the front of the riot shield obscured much of the mercenary, but behind it were an assortment of weapons. Stun rod, pistol, sawn-off. He looked like riot police, with a few nasty additions, explosives for one thing.

“Alright, listen up. The name’s Rook and I represent the Kingdom mercenary group. What you’re about to see is a taste of what we’re capable of, look us up!”

Haelikor

Rook was staring skyward as he finished his little speech, as if trying to find the cameras that were out there watching him, televising his little advertisement further than any advertisement had gone before. The amount of money Kingdom was saving on ad revenue from the free stuff, and all Rook had to do was beat in a few heads and get some sparring done.

“Oh, did you say sommat mate?” Rook realised a little too late that Omi was saying something, perhaps believing his little speech had been aimed at him. Rook shrugged his shoulders apologetically, as much as a man can when holding a large shield. “I was just speaking to the masses mate, I’ll get to you in a sec,” he jibed, trying to remember if there was anything else he needed to say. “Oh yeah, you’ll find our booth in Sigil, we’re new in town, but we got what you need and all that shit,” he called up to the sky above, and then finally he looked back to Omi.

“Alright, now, where were we? Oh yeah, gotta fight you, right, right, to work then.”

En… Garde? The Rook didn’t see any fencing sword in the Jester’s hand.

“En Garde? The hell are you chatting about, ah fuck it.” The Brawler didn’t really like the look of that spherical object the wizard Jester had pulled out his ass, but he figured shooting at him and it couldn’t hurt. His fingers slipped the catch on his chest holster with ease and out slid a little pepperball pistol, just for Omi. It would be a tad difficult to make out what he was doing behind the shield, but when the pistol was suddenly levelled it would all become apparent, perhaps a little too late.

“Catch.” He fired three times in quick succession, sending three plump little balls of pain hurtling at just over two hundred feet per second at the court jester. Centre of mass, of course, though trailing upwards just a tad to finish at his sternum. If anyone was counting, they’d note that the little projectiles covered the fifty feet between them in quarter of a second, so really it was just down to how good Rook’s aim was if the pepperballs landed on target.

Haelikor

“Huh, the GCL let you in with a drone then? I thought you guys liked it mano-a-mano, did you come to see two fighters duke it out or not?” Rook called, a little disappointed, though who he was really directing his remarks to was a little unclear. He seemed to be warming up nicely though, his shots had been good, even if the little jester had some pesky wizardry that let him dive to the ground real quick like that, which he would have to watch out for in future. With the guy on the ground covering his head there was naught much point for shooting pepperballs, and making the shot with beanbags would be pretty difficult from fifty feet away, though far from impossible.

Rook unconsciously started walking forwards, his shield presented as a barrier and a first line of defence against whatever Omi could muster. His steps carried him to one of those ramped little alcoves along the edge of the trench at about the same time as the little drone could cover twenty-five feet, which gave him a quick out if the thing started barrelling towards him firing missiles or something. Who really knew what it was capable of after all?

Rook pointed his pistol at his prone enemy’s form and squeezed off five more shots as he advanced, allowing for the natural drop of the paintballs they could easily skim across Omi's lower back, a few more would probably crash into his arms which would be fairly painful at this range, and a couple more ruptured on the wood directly in front of him, splattering him with fragments that quickly released debilitating gas around him. Some of which was altogether likely to seep through his arms and into his eyes. Not particularly useful for Rook, but it would be interesting to see how the Jester dealt with blindness as the mercenary holstered his spent weapon.

Like magic, a ball shaped metal canister had appeared in Rook’s hands as he deftly plucked it from his chest pocket upon relinquishing his pistol. He looked over towards Omi, checked the robots position, and prepared to hop right into the alcove beside him.

Haelikor > Pepperballs: 8 spent, two mags remaining.

Shooting the shit out of the man had revealed a nasty trick his little drone was capable of. Apparently, it could turn into a powerful vacuum cleaner and suck up projectiles, perhaps even larger objects, around it. Now, Rook wasn’t entirely sure why the Jester was going around fighting with Henry the Hoover by his side, but he was never one to question another man’s methods. What the burly bastard did find himself questioning was the man’s remarks about Rook’s own shield being as akin to Rook as the drone was to the Jester.

“Mate, pretty sure my shield doesn’t shout shit in unison with me, can you sing a duet with that thing?” He quipped, as he drew the Stingball grenade from his chest pocket, since he had nothing else to do at the time. Apparently turning itself into a vacuum cleaner had the effect of stopping the robot, so Rook felt no pressing need to get ready to dive out of the trench and instead advanced a few more paces, putting the gap between the two of them down to a scant thirty-five feet. Presuming the drone didn’t immediately advance during this process, Rook was happy to stop next to another of those little ramped sharpshooting alcoves. They were a handy out for the big man, who would probably struggle to climb out in all his gear.

Rook had, up until that point, been masquerading as if he were holding both handles on his shield as he advanced. Which was… sort of exactly what he was doing, but with a grenade in his hand, so not exactly, but mostly what he was doing. With nothing much else going on, he regarded Omi as the oddly attired man began a sort of haggard advance, perhaps feeling the effects of his violent upchucking, or some other form of fatigue.

Then, with no prior warning, the merc flicked his finger against the priming mechanism of his little explosive, waited half a second, and launched it overarm over the top of his own shield. He threw it with sizable force, strength was not something that Rook was short on, so much so that it flew just short of the speed of a pitcher's fastball without any of the body-work. The consequence for Rook of cooking the grenade was that the fuse detached with a fiery splash almost the moment it left his hand, which may very well distract Omi for just long enough for the thing to actually slam into his lower torso, where it was aimed. This wasn't accounting for any other reality where Omi didn’t stand around gaping but used some fancy shmancy magic to save his ass, but should it slam into him the impact would likely hurt, and then it would fall in front of him. If he moved out the way, Rook had thrown in such a way as for it to hit the ground about five feet behind him.

In either case, once the fuse was safely detached and a second had passed, the little container would erupt with vicious rubber balls that would non-lethally, but rather painfully, collide with near anything in a ten-foot radius as they bounced wildly on the wood slats and even off the walls of the trench. Outside of that ‘debilitation’ range, minor bruising and kinetic impact was still a realistic prospect, but inside it, bones could be broken or fractured, concussions could be had, shit would suck. Rook’s hand sought the grip of his shotgun, and he grinned.

Haelikor

Rook couldn’t quite help but stare dumfounded as the little robot began belting out a RNB classic. Or, in his timeline, more of a recent pop hit. Still, he had a job to do, and he was going to get on with it. He threw his grenade soon after the song ended, and it crashed into Omi’s torso with an audible impact that told Rook he was wearing something hard underneath his clothes. Not that the mercenary needed any special sensory capacity to tell that much, as the grenade promptly exploded and tore the man’s outfit to pieces, revealing him still standing with an assortment of armoured gear now caught in the sunlight. Omi’s little outburst following this about the grenade being legal amused the Rook, and he spoke even as the little robot began to backtrack.

“You a pussy or sommat? Scared of a hundred or so rubber balls are ya mate?” Rook shook his head in mock disapproval as he cocked and drew his shotty, hefting it up onto his shoulder so both barrels were visible as sun glinted off their metalwork. If the guy was afraid of those toys, god knows how he would feel about the sawn-off Rook toted around in one hand like an oversized pistol.

“Now, I feel like I gotta warn ya, this is gunna hurt. So you might wanna, you know, fight back.”

Now that wasn’t like Rook at all, to give a friendly warning. So, what was he doing? Who knew. All that was apparent was him shrugging the shotgun off his shoulder and pointing it past his shield, as if taking careful aim at Omi. The barrel tilted upwards slightly, making it apparent he was aiming for Omi’s face, yet he didn’t fire immediately. It was more interesting to see how Omi reacted to the threat of the shotgun pointed at him. Once Rook knew how he reacted to being aimed at, it’d be easy enough to compensate for any movements he made and -then- pull the trigger. See if he could dodge the trigger being pulled, eh?

Haelikor

The man lined up to pitch his metallic object and Rook quickly crouched, allowing his shield to take the brunt of the incoming blast. There wasn’t a whole lot the Rook could do to prevent himself being affected by that odd grenade. If it had spewed burning fire or shrapnel he would have been done for, but instead the thing exploded with gaudy yellow smoke that quickly dissipated. Rook held his breath, not fully trusting the filtration system inbuilt to his mask which was hardly designed to be air-tight. Yet it seemed whatever the strange magical device was destined to do, it wasn’t choke him to death or kill him through some insidious means.

Shrugging, the man stood with perhaps a little more ease than before, feeling light in his boots. He took this to be the natural result of the adrenaline pumping through his veins, giving him access to all the strength in his muscular form. Little did he know he had been struck with a magic that changed his body’s natural physics, making him like rubber, bouncy and more resilient to blunt force. Why the Jester had done this to him Rook did not know, unsurprisingly, as he was still unsure exactly what had been done to him.

Still, Rook was never one to let weird magic shit get him down, so as he planned before he shrugged his shotgun off his shoulder and pointed at Omi as he mounted Resolution, barrelling towards him with reckless abandon. He’d like to see him avoid a beanbag round while standing on that stupid thing!

The shotgun fired as per usual, firing an even less lethal than usual projectile towards Omi’s throat. A bad shot by all accounts, as Rook was aiming for his head. Without stopping to check the effects, he’d just step to the right and into the shooters alcove, where he could quickly launch his shield and shotgun up (where they unusually bounced and settled again) and climb into no-man’s land himself. Omi would see neither hide nor hair of him if he barrelled straight to the place where he had disappeared, but he might find another surprise instead. Rook wasn’t quite out of tricks yet.

Haelikor

Rook scooped up his shotgun as it finally stopped bouncing, pulling his heavy body fully out of the trench and breaking the barrel. He quickly reloaded while he had a spare moment. Then, he poked his arm back through the bar on his shield and hefted it, his mind a whir. Something fucking weird had happened to his equipment, and him apparently. He was all bouncy, and that probably meant his weapons all were as well, judging by the lack of impact his bean-bag had. The problem was how long that would last, because if he simple bounced off things he wasn’t going to be beating any skulls in. Damn wizard Jesters and their trickery!

Still, he figured he might as well take advantage of the odd situation. Holstering his shotgun for the time being and un-cocking it, he entered a low crouch as a timer began counting down. Three, four. Further down the length of the trench, the little robot had just popped straight up into no-man’s land. Apparently, it was a lot more mobile than he gave it credit for. It was damn quick as well, he needed to get out the way of it in case that Jester had some capacity to see what it saw. Likely, considering it had built in mic capacity.

Rook burst to his feet as a mad idea sprung into his mind. Usually, he’d have considered the width of a the trench a little out of his jumping range at a twelve-foot gap. Yet this bounciness he felt gave him faith that he could make it, so before the robot could get close enough to do anymore of that sucking nonsense, he jumped clean across the trench.

For a brief moment, Omi would see the large form of Rook sailing through the air, his left arm crossed around his body so the shield covered his right side and sparked up with electricity as he activated it, not perfectly covering him, but adequately. And then, he’d be gone again.

Five, six. Rook landed cleanly on the other side of the trench, having used his flight as an opportunity to make some ground from the little drone pursuing him, but also to spot Omi’s position for what he had in mind. Looking around to check the drone’s position again, the big man’s right hand fell to his chest pocket for another explosive. If he would draw it or not depended on Omi’s positioning as Rook dived across the trench and the actions of the drone as its target re-located.

Haelikor

Rook, for his part, was aware of an additional passenger just as soon as those red hooked snakes latched onto him. Assuming the worse, he twisted as much as possible in mid-air to get a better look, his head turning unfavourably for his would-be assassin as the face-mask was presented in the direction that knife threatened. And then, almost too quick to see, Omi had appeared just off Rook’s right shoulder, and with an instinct inbred into humans from birth the Rook reacted the only way he could to the Jester’s sudden knife assault, he covered his head.

Steel knuckled, kevlar coated, his glove covered right hand shot up in a boxer’s guard and met the knife’s point, the blade rebounding off the metal and cutting across the top of his right hand as it came in from the left. It momentarily jammed in the tougher armour on his forearm, and then flew past him entirely as blood ran in rivulets down Rook’s arm. All of this was almost too quick for Rook to process, as Omi’s weight crashed into him and he turned as much as possible, his left shoulder cracking into the ground as he fell in an ungainly fashion to the other side of the trench. If not for the rubberization of his limbs, that could have been a dislocated limb to boot. Six, seven. Surprisingly, the riot-shield’s edge contacted the dirt and bounced back nary a moment before Rook himself did, improbably causing it to jump up between he and his aggressor as Rook’s body naturally turned so his back was to the dirt and his weight prevented him from bouncing so impressively, and now it was Omi’s turn to worry as he went down with Rook, for the electrified rim of the Tower’s shield was bouncing back to meet him on his way down, and that meeting would be… shocking.

Rook would need a moment to even work out what was going on as his breath came in sudden gasps and pain flared up from his hand, but the last vestiges of Omi’s magical bomb could come back to haunt the Jester if Rook’s bouncing shield caught him mid-fall and electrocuted him. If not, he’d have to get over to Rook’s right side and sharpish, or that shield would meet him yet and that collision would be far from pretty for the murderous Jester.

Haelikor > Assume Rook's right hand is just sort of at the ready around neck-height.

Feeling his body return to its natural solidity was an indescribable feeling, so Rook didn’t bother trying to describe it. Instead, his rational mind did a quick situation check. The rim of his shield had made contact with Omi’s crossed left arm, shocked him, then Omi had rather unceremoniously collapsed down on top of him, with his shield separating the two of them. So, that brought things up to the present, where Rook’s right hand was perfectly placed to seize the additional handle on the right of the shield for when a little extra oomph was required. Like right now, as his whispering foe sprawled on top of him, Rook pushed with all his might, his right arm naturally producing greater force than his left due to the difference in position. As he gained ground, he quickly bent his right knee, and with that Omi would feel his balance point shift as he was roughly upended off the left side of the riot shield, and more importantly, dumped off Rook’s body.

Digging the shield into the earth, he pushed himself up onto his left knee facing leftward, unconsciously mimicking the exact same motion he had used in his fight against Felix earlier in the competition. Omi’s attempt at grappling was doomed due to him first needing to wrap his legs around the riot-shield’s significant width, as it was designed to protect Rook’s entire upper torso from assault. He could do that, but that would leave him clinging like a limpet to the shield as it was roughly upended, and Rook could quickly turn the table on him.

The result for the two fighters should see Rook kneeling, with Omi rolled to the ground in front of him, and the trench to Rook’s right side. If all that occurred as planned, Rook would reach for the shotgun at his side, keeping the shield between them still even though the kill switch had activated. He was already in the process of loosening his left arm from the strap though, holding onto it with a token effort only. And from his right he would clearly hear the approaching drone, and know to hurry things up some. He was waiting to see if Omi tried to get to his feet and make a break for it, peaking over the top of the blacked out middle section.

Ten, eleven.

Haelikor > Killswitch Post 1

Rook hadn’t discounted the possibility that Omi would cling to his shield, like a limpet, but rather had disregarded it as a somewhat foolish strategy. Did the guy really want to be holding onto an object that could suddenly become electrified? Apparently so, as Rook twisted and pretty casually benched Omi’s entire weight, hefting the shield up from below with his right knee, the guy grabbed hold with his legs and arm. As soon as Rook felt the point of balance shift, as his shield started to tilt so Omi’s back would be facing near 10 o’clock, he pushed with all his might to turn his own body anti-clockwise. This was aided in part since Omi’s own weight was dragging the shield and him over anyway, but it was still a hefty task, and his hand was bleeding profusely by the end of it.

Regardless, the end result was basically inevitable as Omi decided to stick to the front of the shield. Their positions would be reversed. Now Omi would slam into the ground back first, as Rook’s weight rolled on top of the back of the shield. Omi would find himself trapped beneath that bulk with the electrified side of the shield flush across most of his body, and Rook was free to let go of the additional handle and draw his baton instead with his right hand. At which point, Rook's ears perked up to the countdown. In all the excitement he'd briefly lost track of time, and it sounded like it was running out for him. He cursed, having his enemy at his complete mercy and being forced to move off him was a massive pain in the ass, but rules was rules. He didn't even have time to pull his shield with him, instead sliding his arm out and turning away from his enemy, leaving him with the riot shield on top of his body as he pegged it back towards the trenches, jumping clean in with a hefty sounding landing on the other side.

Haelikor > Killswitch: Post 2

Rook jogged to the edge of the trench and jumped down. He didn’t really want to dive all the way to the bottom, rough on the knees, so he did so by sort of sliding his weight down and catching the lip of the trench with his free left hand, swinging down to the wooden slats below. It was mid-way through this monkeyish descent that he caught the ominous looking robot thing the Jester used in combat staring at the wall a few feet to his right, but there wasn’t much he could do about it until he hit the ground.

“Oh shit, not you!” He spat, grabbing something from his chest pocket as soon as both feet touched the ground before pushing explosively off the wooden slats and trying to get some distance from the little robot. He hadn’t noticed the vacuum like effects at this point, at least not beyond a slight tugging at his back, but as rock and dust blew directly into his mask and dirt clogged up the air around him he was more than aware of it as his feet dug in. Although there were certainly a fair number of discarded objects around the arena, only one was in any position to threaten Rook in the ten-foot radius, a big spade as luck would have it. The entrenching tool smashed into his chest handle first and flew under his right arm, causing Rook to let his breath out in a gasp of pain.

“Motherfucking drones!”

Rook wasn’t standing for that shit. Presumably Omi did not mean to jump into a barrage of weapons himself, therefore the vacuum would have ended before he himself made to jump into the trench. At which point Rook had pulled the pin on his grenade, turned and suddenly thrown it up into the air above the lip of the trench, perfectly timed to explode in mid-air full on in Omi’s face. And the dirt and debris covering the drone, especially the wet globs of mud, would probably prevent it giving him forewarning of Rook’s attack this time. If Omi’s gaze was caught within the vicinity of the sudden eruption of light, he would be blinded for up to five seconds, bar some magical aid.

Rook covered his face with his left arm at the right moment to block the flash of his own grenade as he hugged the side of the trench Omi was jumping from and held his baton at the ready, making it unlikely that Omi would immediately spot him from afar. No matter what, the timer dictated that Omi had to get down into the trench with Rook, the question was where he chose to land, and if he’d be debilitated when he did so. Rook doubted it. Nothing is ever easy when magic’s involved.

Haelikor