Back from two weeks of working at a makeshift clinic! Glad that cat that messed my hands up didn't do any permanent damage. Or have rabies. But yeah, back home, back in the zone. I been keeping you waiting for long enough.
So, with the sharp increase of reviews, it's only right to do more than just take them and go. They definitely keep me inspired, and so I should at least respond, let you guys know I actually read them.
Anonymous: Well, from an objective standpoint, we don't really know much about either as far as ability, nothing much is set in stone. But I'll leave it to the readers to figure out how it goes down.
Jam-Man265: Don't worry, bro; I haven't forgotten what Huniepop is all about. :)
Lunalove25: I never pegged Celeste as one either. But it's always good to shake up the formula a little, eh?
thequietman: Thanks! Keeps me inspired! And keep those eyes open!
TopPriority: All will unfurl in the chapters to come. Just you wait!
That said, I fancy creators that listen, and I intend to do just that. But for now, I been keeping you waiting long enough. Enjoy!
For the fights last night, the bar had cleared out the tables and chairs from one corner of the lounge, leaving the fighters to duke it out in the sawdust-strewn floor. Now that Tala was fighting in the big leagues with high roller patrons, the management of this underground lounge spared no expense in setting up an actual arena.
Tala was escorted by the elven waitress into an octagonal ring. Plexiglas walls gave the spectators a perfect view of the match while keeping the carnage contained. "Including you and the champion, there are eight competitors in this tournament," she explained. "After each match, the victor will be allowed to continue."
"So I'll have to knock out the others if I want a piece of that 'satyr', Celeste," Tala surmised.
"Indeed. If you wish to face her, you will need to eliminate all of your competition." For some reason, the elf girl averted her eyes as she replied.
The lounge patrons were gathering around the arena windows, a mix of Earth creatures and even more bizarre alien spectators. The elf girl quickly exited and locked the arena entrance. On the opposite side of the octagon, another waitress had escorted Tala's first-round rival - the proud lamia she'd seen boasting to her friends in the lounge.
"A humie? Thisss'll be quick," the snake-woman cackled as she stood on her tail, raising to an imposing height. The tip of her snake half thumped the arena floor like a scaly club, eager to strike.
"You have no idea," Tala murmured under her breath.
The instant the announcer called their names and counted down the match, Tala lunged for the snake-woman's tail, which reared back in turn to slam her like a spring-loaded trap. At the last second, Tala dodged with a springy side-step, and before the massive whip-like appendage could strike again, Tala planted a foot atop the tail and dashed along the scaly roadway. A flying leap allowed her to seize the snake woman's human half in a bear hug, and the forceful lunge sent them both crashing to the floor.
"Damn insssect," the lamia cried as Tala shoved her face into the ground and twisted her arm behind her back, ushering a aggravated cry from her opponent. The crowd cheered and hollered, but the lamia wasn't done yet. Her tail writhed blindly, trying to swipe Tala off her back.
'Time to finish this.' Tala surmised, delivering blow after blow to the back of the lamia's head until her thrashing tail went limp and her human half slumped to the floor.
In short order match was won, but the crowd's shouting only grew in volume and bloodlust. The half-conscious lamia groaned as she looked up at Tala, who began to rise from her hold.
"Well? Do it, already." she coughed.
Tala drew back, suddenly realizing what the waitress had meant about "eliminating" her opposition.
Feeling the pressure in her head go back down, Tala stood up and stepped back from her defeated opponent. And that sparked an adverse reaction in the audience.
Upon realizing that two combatants would be leaving the arena alive, the crowd quickly bombarded with the basso sound of boos and ear-splitting hisses. Were it not for the Plexiglas, she'd also have been bombarded by the food and drink of the patrons.
Rather than viewing their disapproval in a negative light, Tala wore the biggest grin as she bowed and blew kisses, which only seemed to further aggravate the crowd. The sheer audacity of this woman made the lamia hiss in utter contempt.
Tala, in turn, offered the woman a hand. "Are you alright?"
Despite the lamia's brief moment of conflict, she reaffirmed her glare and swatted away Tala's supportive hand before immediately regretting her action as a migraine shot through her scaled hood. "Kindness will get you killed, amazon. You've already lost your fans," she panted, clutching her head.
Raising a brow, Tala shrugged. "Screw them. They have all of space to kill each other in. And killing you wouldn't be the fun part of our little dance."
As sound as that logic was, there was still one unavoidable fact. "This is an arena. One lives, one dies," the snake woman argued, picking herself up off the ground with the help of the wall.
"And I imagine you'd rather be alive. So would I."
There were often negative repercussions when you came into someone else's place and started dictating policy, but what the hell else could she have done? She never got tired of fighting(there was a reason thoughts of Audrey kept pumping through her head), it was that, not the kill, that excited her. And unless they were something along the lines of a serial killer, totally screwed in the head, she preferred not to kill. Damian the lady killer was a prime example. But that aside, Tala felt good knowing she kept herself in check in places like this.
XXXXX
"Miss, it is quite the surprise you spared your opponent," Cerene piped up as she poured the redhead a brew of Irish ale.
"We're not in ancient times, Cerene." 'I suppose that's why this place is underground,' she thought to herself as she took a hearty swig of the stiff drink. Morals were good and all, but when something weighed heavy on one's mind, a stiff drink did well in numbing one's worries.
"If only the people here shared your sentiment."
"I don't see why I should stop. Who knows? The audience might like a good redemption story for the tournament after this."
Pay-per-view wrestling wasn't always just two guys -or gals- duking it out until a three-count sounded. There were people to root for, people to root against, but gladiatorial entertainment was possible without someone getting killed at the end of each match.
Maybe it was simply her take on the matter, or the effect she had on people, but Tala's good will seemed to rub off on the waitress as she gave Tala a hopeful smile before scampering off to service the other bar-goers.
As she watched her elven acquaintance depart, Tala took a moment to think. She'd gotten quite a bit of flak for refusing to kill, but she also got some pats on the back from some of her fellow combatants after she made it back to the lobby. She'd dispatched her opponent, whom the roster identified as Nagessa, with nary a scratch and in only a few moves. That might have informed them as to just who they were dealing with, and who would be fighting Celeste later in the tournament. And Nagessa was presumably a force to be reckoned with in her own right, with how she carried herself before the match.
Though not every opponent had been impressed.
"You are weak, Tala stone."
Ah, Celeste. She was one of the few who hadn't yet put in her two cents.
Sitting up in her seat, Tala found the blue alien leaning against the seat across from her. "I prefer the term sensible, Celeste." she replied, trying to gauge the champion's motives for speaking to her. And taking another sip.
Tala couldn't place her finger on it, but Celeste didn't seem like the bloodthirsty type either. But it only served to give the amazon pause when Celeste asked her next question. "Why spare a gladiator who would have killed you without a second thought?"
Nonetheless, Tala's answer came naturally. "Honey, everything I fight would have killed me without a second thought."
"Curious. We shall see how far your 'sensibilities' take you in the tournament." With that, the blue alien stalked back towards the fighting cage. Her own match was about to commence, and Tala was eager to see. She wanted a front row look at Celeste's fighting style, but a familiar presence at her side made her pause and brighten.
"Nikki! So you decided to watch after all."
"Yes. I mean, yup. I mean -" she swallowed nervously. "- yeah, I'm here to watch ... and stuff."
"You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost." For some reason, Tala's joke seemed to put the girl further on edge. Her back went ramrod stiff and her glasses nearly fell off her face in fright.
"Ghosts? Me? Nope, nuh-uh. No way. Totally fine. I'm totally fine." Then she started laughing to try and ease the tension. If anything, the awkwardness grew along with Tala's bewilderment.
Applying a steady hand to the bluenette's upper back and the other to her stomach, Tala helped her loosen up her stiff posture, taking the nerd girl's blush as a good sighn. "C'mon Nick. I think we know each other better than that."
"I'm ... just a little nervous," Nikki clarified. "About you getting hurt, I mean."
"Aww, relax. Look, I just got through my first match - no worse for wear. C'mon, let's go back upstairs and I'll tell you all about it."
"NO!"
Nikki's cry startled them both. "I mean ... no thank you. I'd rather stay and watch the next match. I need to see everything."
Tala frowned. Simple brawls to exhaustion were one thing, but she didn't want Nikki anywhere near a death match. Why was the bluenette so agitated? "All right," she relented, "but when I tell you, you have to promise me that you'll look away, got it?"
"Je sais."
"Huh?"
"I mean, I know," Nikki repeated, nervously glancing over her shoulder. "C'mon, the match is starting, right?"
Again, Tala frowned, but went along with the younger girl. Her fighter status meant the crowds parted readily for them, and soon they were up against the Plexiglas walls as Celeste, the champion, was introduced.
The alien's opponent was a creature that turned Nikki's jitters into shock. "Is that a ... girtablilu?"
"A person with a giant scorpion for an ass? Yeah."
The half-woman looked like anything within five feet of her front might as well be inside of a giant food processor with those giant crab-styled claws on her bottom half. And unlike lamias, a girtablilu, or a scorrow as Nikki preferred, was covered in a thick exoskeleton all down her scorpion physiology, and from the looks of it, it would take nothing short of a pickaxe to get through it. 'Or Celeste's piston kicks.' But Tala didn't go for the lower half when she fought the lamia, and presumably, neither would Celeste with this one.
And that was the case as the fight began. The scorpion woman charged forth with her tail ready to stab anything her claws couldn't grab, but Celeste dodged both, jumping back before launching herself forward as the tail recoiled from the miss.
Celeste's first attack, a lunging kick, was hastily blocked by one of those armored claws, before the other snapped at her, intent to sever a limb. But Celeste's counterattack turned into an all-out assault as her legs turned into the inner workings of a machine gun, cloven feet hammering against thick chitin, pushing the enemy back, leaving with cracked, damaged defenses. Celeste then pressed her advantage with a quick hook and an uppercut before jumping back to avoid a reactive tail.
Tala was impressed. "I can see the merit." Celeste was fast. So fast, she slipped through defenses with the awareness and reflexes of an attentive cat, and hit with the force of a charging bull.
The scorrow thought she'd try a broad sweep with her massive tail by using her eight legs to spin her large arachnid frame around, but the blue huntress saw the move coming from a mile away. As soon as the tail came around, Celeste dashed forward, akin to a pounce.
The blue alien flipped forward, bringing her foot tothe scorrow's temple with the accuracy of a surgeon. The girtablilu's heavy frame crumpled to the ground like a pile of rocks strung together. Needless to say, she was down for the count. But whether he was alive was an entirely academic matter.
Tala released a breath she didn't know she was holding. "I definitely see the merit."
All around them, the crowd's bloodlust was rising again. Fists pounded on the Plexiglas walls like a mad heartbeat - "kill, kill, kill!"
Celeste took her time fulfilling the final blow - she sauntered around the crumpled fighter, eyeing the crowd for any watching competitors and locking stares. When her golden orbs found Tala, Celeste seized the girtablilu by her hair and yanked her upright, eliciting a scream from the barely breathing half-breed. The amazon felt her heart hitch in her chest as Celeste dragged the scorpion woman across the floor and slammed the woman's bruised and bloodied face into the glass for all to see. The message was etched clearly in Celeste's dismissive smirk: 'The same will happen to you, human.'
Tala sucked in her breath as Celeste pulled the scorpion woman's head back, one hand clasped around the chin, the other behind the head. Without a moment's hesitation, Celeste jerked her hands outward, and with a sickening snap audible enough to give the bloodthirsty audience pause, the monster woman slump to the ground, wearing an expression of agony, but alltogether lifeless.
The crowd's adulations turned to boos and jeers, but Celeste didn't give a damn. Tala understood that the performance had been for an audience of one.
Her.
'Killing a weakling like you isn't worth the effort.'
A cocksure grin spread across Tala's face. "We'll see about that, Miss Champion. ... Nikki?"
She just caught the bluenette bolting through the crowd in the direction of the washroom.
And just like that, Tala's focus was no longer on her enemy. 'Dammit, how could I let her see that?'
XXXXX
After vomiting into the nearest sink, Nikki removed her glasses and washed her face. Even without spectacles, she could still see the image of the scorpion woman's bloodied face. The gruesome image was permenantly stamped into her mind.
'That'll be Tala...'
When she found the strength to put on her lenses and look up into the mirror, a second face - pale, ghostly flesh and frosty bangs - stared down on her.
"I can't let Tala keep coming here," Nikki pleaded.
"Now you know ze danger of coming here."
That French accent could do nothing to muffle the blunt seriousness of her tone, and she was definitely right. Though there was always an underlying tone of unease, even upstairs in the no-killing arena, Nikki had still carried on and tried her best to indulge herself in one of her lifelong fantasies. But it seemed that life was always determined to shove a lethal dose of reality down her uneager throat. And it made her sick.
The bluenette could feel the nausea and the migraine intensifying as she felt her stomach backflip for another round of vomiting. She grabbed a handful of her locks, doing her best to will away her body's urge to cleanse itself. "I-I didn't think that she'd kill her! Tala didn't!" she exclaimed, lowering her eyes down into the sink so she could get a handle on her thoughts again. It did her service, as she reflected on her words. 'Tala didn't.' The thought and sight of her champion and friend sparing her opponent, helping the lamia up, and even giving her advice went a long way in easing her mind. She'd smile, but then she'd remember not long after when the scorrow stopped moving.
The pale woman's gaze hardened, those red eyes flickering with a bit of fire. "Zhis is a deathmatch, and your... client isn't playing by ze rules set in place." The satyr made the rules abundantly clear; two fighters go in, one comes out.
"Because she's not a killer!" Nikki unwaveringly snapped in her Tala's defense. But she slowly retracted at the thought of Audrey's former boyfriend. Though that was justified, as he would've sucked Audrey dry, and likely other relatively innocent girls, a death is a death, and she didn't take his lightly.
"All ze more reason neither of you should be here." There was no argument there.
It briefly crossed Nikki's mind what she needed to know and do and become in order to be in a place like this, and when she took stock of herself - a bite-sized virgin girl standing among members of folk and myth who'd kill to get someone like her - this woman's sentiment rang all the more true.
Doing her best to will away the migraine, the bluenette nodded. She held her forehead with a delicate tenderness, and she could feel and somewhat hear the aggravated thump of her pulse. "Okay."
But before another word could be spoken, the specter vanished. Alone, Nikki closed her eyes and released a shaky breath.
"Nikki?" Came the concerned voice of Tala as the hasty and heavy footsteps of boots made it into the wash room, rushing up to the bluenette. Before Nikki could even utter her name, the stressed girl felt a strong, but at the same time gentle, supportive hand on her arm and another on her back, urging her upright from the sink. "Nikki, are you alright?"
Pulling herself upright, no longer using the sink as support, Nikki faced her friend. "You... you can't keep doing this!" Tala's gentle touch only reminded her why Nikki didn't want her to get hurt. Under that heavy chest and taut muscle, beat the heart of a wonderful woman who shone like a full moon -no, a sun- in the dreary and gloomy sky that was once Nikki's boring and pointless existence. To see the glimmer of that sun fade would drop her back into another moonless night, even colder than the one she had gotten used to. And she'd do everything she could to stop it.
Tala tilted her head. "What, the tournament?" Nikki nodded. The amazon couldn't say she wasn't prepared for this, but her reason wasn't exactly reassuring. Sighing, Tala moved her hands to the nerd girl's dainty shoulders, wanting her full attention. "I'm not prepared to do that, Nikki. Someone has to knock that woman down a peg."
That only heightened the desperation in Nikki's eyes and her voice. "She just killed someone, Tala! Just to prove a point! To you!" The exasperation in her tone told Tala just how much she got to her, if the remnants of the bile in the sink wasn't already indication enough. That was undeniable, and Tala regretted ever having to put her through this.
But they were in this now, and it was clear something had to be done, lest that fallen scorrow, and very possibly others, die in vain.
"Someone has to put her in her place, Nikki. If I break her arm or a leg, she'll think twice about coming back."
That was her battle plan, thought up by her mind and her instincts working as one. Her amazon blood coursed at the challenge laid out before her, and her fair-headed mind called for that blue alien to pay for what she did. Both parts of her working together wasn't rare, given her career, as fighting deadly creatures called for both, but if there were two sides of her arguing on her monolithic shoulders, they'd be shaking hands right now and hyping each other.
"And what if you don't come back?!"
Despite how much Tala was invested in her plan, Nikki's angered cry cut through both sides of the amazon's thought process, and she felt her heart ache with a pain that eclipsed her desire to fight.
Tala closed her eyes, sighing. "You don't make this easy for me, Nikki." she whispered, giving the smaller girl's arms a reassuring rub. "But this is something I have to do. As long as that satyr is here, more fighters are gonna bite the dust 'just to prove a point'. I can't let that keep happening."
Up until now, it had just been her trying to have fun, duking it out with exotic people. Even though she and Nikki wanted this -they jumped for this- She'd been foolish, bringing her along without considering the risk of Nikki encountering something she wasn't prepared for, something it wasn't her right to prepare her for. But now, Tala was invested, and she couldn't let this needless death, or the ones bound to follow in the girtablilu woman's wake, go unanswered. She didn't kill needlessly. Just because she wouldn't go out of her way to be menacing, to show everyone how much of a fighter she was, that didn't make her any less threatening than Celeste.
It just means those she opposed got to live to fight another day. She'd come to grips that this was a deathmatch arena, but that scorpion woman was executed because of her, and that simply wasn't okay.
If she caused this problem, she was damn sure gonna fix it.
Another chapter, done and done. I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts on the events unfurling. I have the rest of this arc mapped, but there's always room for improvement, found in your constructive criticism. Or just inspiration from your thoughts. Either way, leave a review, tell me what you think, and I'll see you next chapter! It'll come out real soon. Stay frosty!
Oh! and what do you think about the new image?