Please ignore the horrifically unimaginative chapter title. Also the entire story title.
Also, I'm going to do a thing where I put the characters that do and don't belong to me at the beginning of the chapter. Even if I've already put them at the beginning of a different chapter. Thank you to:
Camila Cuevas, for creating Jade- she's the first RHG stick fighter I ever saw and she was and is and always will be my favorite stick.
XtremeAnimates, for creating Yupia- she's AMAZING and AWESOME and I love her and everything she does. Though most videos involving her are incredibly gory.
Cruz is just a OC of mine; she's a young wannabe RHG fighter and worships Jade as a RHG fighter and the leader of NEMESIS a ton. But she is generally hardened to gore and battle, due to a lot of street fighting that she has to deal with and not to mention sparring with her friends (coughWHATFRIENDScough), and her weapon is- as mentioned -a huge blue ax that drips liquid nitrogen from the blade. The flow of nitrogen can cut off at her mental command. Cruz is actually very cold towards most people; unless she's angry, she doesn't like to show any type of emotion besides hatred or anger or disgust. Not a very good first impression. She's a very pale blue stick with dark blue hair streaked with white. Her eyes are electric blue but somehow darken to midnight-blue when she's fighting.
That's it for now! I'll stop bothering y'all and let you read the story. If you even want to anymore, haha. Enjoy!
The rose-colored stick carelessly yanked her sword out of the last attacker, not bothering to wipe the blood off afterwards. A solid hit, that was, and she would have been proud of herself had she been able to feel emotions.
Of course she couldn't see the destruction and gore before her, but she could smell and sense it and her sensory message receivings gave her far more information about the scene than any sort of sight would. A glowing pink line on her visor rippled like a sound wave, and a small smile graced her features at her own thoughts. Over 20 deaths of the RHG gladiators had ocurred in the last week, and it was rather admirable that she had caused every single one of them.
"Yupia." Ah. Besides this one.
She had been effectively evasive, and though the part-cyborg had tried to find and kill her, she had, unfortunately, failed. "You owe me a battle."
Yupia turned to face Cruz, the young whitish-blue female stick with a large blue ax that dripped liquid nitrogen constantly. "And why do you say that?"
"My sister is dead, because of you." Advancing slowly, Cruz didn't take her quickly darkening blue eyes off of Yupia's currently inactive visor. "Cameron did nothing to you. You don't just owe me a battle, you owe me a life."
Yupia didn't move, didn't even raise her sword. Her pink scarf rippled in the wind. "I am on a mission to erase humanity. She is a human, or am I wrong?"
Cruz was now only a few feet away from Yupia. "Cameron was a human with good intentions and a good heart, which is more than I can say for you." With that last jab at the motionless stick, she let out a cry and rushed headfirst at Yupia, ax ready and up.
What a stupid move. Going head first, that's- Yupia's train of thought was cut off when her opponent suddenly darted to the left, curving the path of her ax in a cut to the side. Yupia just managed to avoid being split open, but it still caught her on the hip, and the sudden loss of alkaline chemicals made her weak and dizzy. Shit. She hadn't realized that she was already low on energy; her last and much too recent battle had drained her of essential chemicals to battle. This fight had not started like she had wanted it to, and that pissed her off in the most emotionless way possible.
Barely bending her knees at all, Yupia leaped high over the head of a startled Cruz and landed behind her back, taking a quick slice at the blue stick's back and succeeding in making her yelp and turn much too slowly.
Yupia dodged the next few swings with practiced ease, her amazing agility and speed allowing her to never even touch the giant clunky ax, but she could feel herself slowing. Each time she dodged and took a turn at slicing with her blade, she grew closer and closer to being cut again. And her chemical levels were draining quickly- she could feel it.
For the first time, Yupia let herself believe that this might be the first battle she would ever lose. And Cruz might be the last opponent she would face.
As if she could hear her thoughts, Cruz smirked. "I can see you slowing, you monster," she said in a satisfied, arrogant tone over her ax, "At one point, you're gonna have to give up. You're going to die today, Yupia, and it will be at my hands." After a pause due to slicing with her ax, she added with a grin that showed her blindingly white teeth, "I will never be more proud to tell people this."
That was the last straw for Yupia. The battle had drawn on long enough.
With a renewed burst of adrenaline- or, in her case, alkaline chemicals -she leaped up high and raised her sword in a flash of gleaming metal, not giving her opponent any time to react. Then, calculating exactly when to start bringing the sword down based on how fast she would fall, she started to lower both her blade and herself on top of the pale blue stick. The wavelength-line on her visor furiously rippled jaggedly, showing all the effort she was really putting into killing this girl. When Yupia was this focused, her victims' death really was unavoidable-
Until it was avoidable, because Yupia suddenly was on the stony ground, her sword no longer in her hand.
"Great… great timing, Jade." Cruz's voice stammered nervously from somewhere a few feet away from where Yupia was lying. "Thanks."
Yupia sensed the dark pink stick called Jade, leader of the NEMESIS clan, walk over to where she was collapsed. Brain wave readings of disgust and the slightly cooler air of her shadow telling her that Jade was looking down at her led her to infer that the highly skilled stick was glaring at Yupia was much disdain and hatred. Interesting.
A slight pull in her head and rather intense pain informed her that a certain metal fan had just been yanked out of the back of her head, which would result in a very huge loss of chemicals, Yupia knew. But she was completely paralyzed; Jade had already sprayed a numbing mist over her body and the stupid people who'd operated on her had left enough nerves in that they controlled her movements.
"You were about to be killed, kid." Jade's voice wasn't exactly emotionless; it had a certain feminine lilt to it that made it impossible to be completely flat, but she didn't seem terribly anxious or worried for the younger stick. "Why would you pick a fight with this… thing?"
A pause signaled that Cruz was either still shocked from the near-death experience or was uncomfortable with telling Jade her past. Yupia assumed it was the latter, since her tone was a bit awkward and forced. "My… my older sister, Cameron. The monster killed her."
"I do have a name, you know." Yupia didn't expect the paralyzing feature to wear off so fast; the words just slipped out without her consent. Control, Yupia.
Were those her own words or her parents' words, repeated over and over to her while agonizing pain radiated out from her eyes, making it-
CONTROL .
"Why's it talking?" jeered Cruz, a bit of her previous mockery slipping into her tone. Yupia didn't react; before, she had been crippled by exhaustion and loss of chemicals, and the flare of anger had risen up without any warning. It had been helpful, really, up until the point where the surprise visitor came in.
"Kid," warned Jade. "And you," she addressed Yupia, gracelessly kicking her onto her back from her position lying face-down on the stone. "I could kick you off of this cliff right now." She shuddered slightly, and Yupia allowed a bit of satisfaction for herself to be felt at the thought of Jade seeing the many, many broken bodies down at the bottom of the cliff. A small smile made Jade tense up with anger. "You won't be smiling when all of your electricity-functioning body parts are crackling in the seawater and slamming against rocks."
The smile didn't disappear, instead getting wider.
"What's wrong with you?" demanded Cruz, coming up next to Jade. "You're insane. You're insane, and a murderer, and you're just a- a piece of f-"
"Kid." Jade cut Cruz off with a glare and a word. "What's your name, anyways?"
This time, it was Yupia that answered. "Her name is Cruz. And she's correct."
Jade frowned even deeper. "What?"
"I am insane. And a murderer. And a piece of fucking shit, if you'd like to put it that way."
Both Cruz and Jade were at a loss for words. They couldn't disagree, but what could they really say to that?
"Come on." Jade finally growled, shaking the fan that wasn't covered in Yupia's version of blood, which made it grow needles from the tips somehow. She stabbed that fan into Yupia's right arm without any warning, and the effect was immediate: a slow, lazy sensation that was immediately recognized as a drug. "Let's take her back to our main aircraft. And by that, I mean NEMESIS's base." Cruz's eyes grew large, and she threw one last look of hatred at Yupia before she turned to start walking. Jade looked down at Yupia as well, then adapted a confused expression when she saw that she was facing straight towards Jade, the neon pink line on her cracked visor rippling slightly every few seconds.
"To answer your question, I'm not asleep because I don't have blood and drugs don't have the same effect on me as humans." She crossed her arms, not even wincing as more strangely-colored chemicals oozed out of her wounds. "Fortunately for you, I… am low on energy, and don't have the energy to fight. So do go on capturing me. It's very amusing."
Jade opened her mouth to retort, but Yupia had already made her point, and Jade realized there was nothing to say to make the situation better. Fuming inwardly, she picked up one of Yupia's legs roughly. The fact that this had no reaction whatsoever only infuriated her further, and forcefully, she yanked her along behind her, dragging her on hard stone with many jagged parts. Yupia stayed with her arms crossed and no reaction.
The walk back to base was a long one.