Where the free-for-all last left off, the inevitable split-off between pairs of opponents had occurred. Diana and Ninon were prepared for a clash after interesting developments, while Shiki was on pursuit against a temporarily-retreating Momoko.
It was only a matter of time before the competition, full of newfound opportunists, dwindled down...
…
While she had a clear target on that young Psycho Soldier prospect, Shiki took her time with her pursuit to accommodate her limp and uncertain way of going around – enough time for the girl in her crosshairs to find somewhere to lay low...
Once she entered the new room, Shiki was faced with a new, fuller arrangement of furniture in a smaller space compared to the central foyer. Not much to the right, with her being merely inches from a wall where she stood at the door way – but to her left, a cloth-covered table, looking to be one worth dining on, with the only other object laid above the cloth being a small cluster of candles.
Shiki had yet to fully grasp the architecture of the building, a side-effect of her displacement within the modern day – but despite that on top of the rest of her generally lost mind, she knew her way around scoping for fresh blood.
She could tell, almost smell the fear coming from somewhere in the room...
…
Momoko tried her hardest not to sweat under the pressure, worried she may slip out of place. If her opponent knew exactly where she was, she would have a much harder time once she retried offense.
The youthful fear in her mind only got worse once she started to hear things.
Plenty of 'metal grinding into wood and cloth' things...
…
Instead of thinking reasonably and throwing the cloth off and aside from the table, or even deciding to get off it and look underneath, Shiki decided to start stabbing her way into it with her katanas. She slowly tore her way through each layer settled above, below and inside the table, just for a means to seek out the challenger.
No drop of blood out of her enemy, coming out of this, was going to bother her – for what she had endured in her timeline, her feelings were far from wired right.
Eventually, she tore away enough chunks out of the top of the table to see through a hole within it – but nothing. She saw nothing in the semblance of a scared girl.
Then she started to hear the creak and jiggle of something, coming somewhere else. By then, she was taking notice of the longcase clock sitting against a wall, near the table. Didn't need a detective to figure out where suspicions truly were, between the light quaking of the clock and the obvious gap in between it and the wall.
Suddenly, THWACK! Down came the tall clock, with the downward momentum of a mallet, smashing against the partially-blocking Shiki – one of her swords pointed outwards at the clock, and wound up stabbing through the wood, but she still took some of the aggressive furniture upon her head, glass shattering into bits over her.
She wasn't too fazed regardless of the sudden assault, her eyes beginning a focus once she started to see Momoko's form peeping out from behind the clock.
The dancer took a moment before jumping up and straight back down with knees upon the wooden grandfather clock, attempting as much pressure as her petite figure could give.
Shiki retaliated swiftly against the weight pushing against her body, swerving sideways as she forced the tall-case clock over and onto the table, pinning Momoko down as the wood-stabbing katana was pulled out.
Mass took its toll, and the table half-collapsed soon after, forcing everything on top to spill over onto the ground, competitors included.
Momoko took the majority of the force dropping down over top, momentarily crunched underneath the clock as it fell with her – while Shiki managed to avoid taking a full tumble to the ground, her footing too expect to let gravity take her down that easily.
Recomposed before long, Shiki let a foot linger atop the toppled clock as she stared down on her opponent. "Your technique... it's... nowhere even close to mine, is it, child?"
Pestered by the stoic taunting of her intimidating opposition, Momoko had quite the struggle with the noticeably damaged grandfather clock on top of her small body. She was sweating bullets from strain and fear.
Shiki's blades handled in opposite directions as the heel of her boot dug deeper against the wood...
…when suddenly...!
POW! A brief pink blast, coming from Momoko's youthful courage, busted a hole through the clock, the collateral damage knocking Shiki back in a way that her wood-standing leg flung nearly past her shoulder as she flipped backwards. A rarity in the events of the tournament so far, seeing Shiki actually get leveled like that.
For a moment, she couldn't even believe herself as she started to get up, craning her neck over as she saw the hole-blown tallcase continue to rustle about on the ground.
Eventually, the wood fully split off from the opposite sides of the crater, as Momoko sat up under her own will – her aching, pained will – and managed to barely stand up. One would imagine the jelly-like feeling through her numbing limbs as she tried to get over the influx of Psycho Power that her barely-experienced body just had to unleash.
"You made me do that..." she said. "I'm already feeling woozy from that. Please don't make me do it again..."
Shiki took a momentary look at how the younger opposition was standing, and before long, she re-tightened the grip on her katanas. Any sense of worry that she could imagine feeling for the prospect was already gone now that she understood which of the two fighters were able to handle their own strength better. Another feeling, however, crawled in to share the space in her mind, as she continued to lock eyes with the girl.
One of Shiki's katanas ground at the tip against the flooring... her tongue barely peeked out from behind the corner of her mouth, a little hesitant to lick by.
"I'll gladly see your potential..."
It took a moment for the blade-for-'blade' round between Diana and Ninon to get into the thick of things, as the two spent a sabre's length away from each other, occasionally twirling their respective weapon, having yet to make contact with the other.
Diana spoke first. "Be honest with your weapon, kid – is that thing going to follow by the rules of what a sabre should do, or will it burn through me like a laser?"
"Depends on what you want."
"Don't bullshit me." Diana lunged forward with the point of her thin sabre, managing only to poke slightly against Ninon's monochrome-black dress as she brought her blade into a blocking spot. The answer to what Diana asked the little witch seemed clearer as the former, as the legitimate sword and the magic-shifted sword collided naturally, with no showcase yet of one overpowering the other.
The blades continued to hug against each other as the wielders paced slowly in a tight circle, metal and magic continuing to make contact even as wrists twisted up, down and around to adjust. Both were going above and beyond to keep on the level of the other, making sure that the age difference was the tiniest factor.
Diana's stance and tactics were simple but optimal, among the more knowledgeable methods of keeping up with the experience she had, and just simply keeping things direct; Ninon was the slightest more unorthodox in comparison with how graceful her legs lingered about – as a matter of fact, she had the magic factor ahead of her as she was allowed the chance to defy gravity. A floaty ballet style to her maneuverability, in short.
The subtle flaws here were mostly on Diana's part, for her slight underestimation against the witch; it started once she knocked in an opening by slapping Ninon's dark rapier out of central focus and coming in with a snide kick to the gut to bring the witch's feet back down, touching the floor, before proceeding to prod low.
The sabre came towards one of Ninon's knees, threatening to clip through; her right leg shifted backwards as Diana's sabre poked outwards, nearly forming a split-legged position as she shifted as quickly as she could to get her sword back into a clash.
Though she hated to feel even the slightest open in the heat of battle, Ninon was not perturbed enough for it to affect her plans in the long term.
With the faux-blade of darkness as the current, a flash of lightning coursed through until it shot out and caught Diana on one of her knees, opening up a vulnerable spot as she was caught half-kneeling with a sweeping kick afterwards. The end result now, was Ninon standing on top, pointing her blade down on the elder NESTS alumnus.
Ninon smiled sinisterly over her opponent. "The demiurge's thunder; you like?"
"The demi-what?" Diana's eyebrows curved in confusion. "The hell are you on about?"
"Hmph... as expected, you know nothing."
The moment taunting what her opponent didn't know, however, was what deprived Ninon of the rest of the time to spend standing on top – as she was almost immediately tripped up from beneath herself with a scissoring kick from Diana.
To recover, Ninon hovered into a magic-assisted cartwheel, managing to recompose gracefully as she maneuvered around. The dark weaponry was prepared for piercing in a moment within her hand, as the witch charged down at the floor where Diana laid.
Vwrp~! Diana was gone in a single moment, a blink of light, and Ninon only landed on the air the opponent left in her vanishing. The sound of teleportation sounded off not too far away from where Ninon knelt, a little bit behind her.
In fact, she could hear the wind separate as a zooming danger loomed soon. She merely smirked at that danger...
"You aren't the only one trained to translocate..."
Vwoosh~! This time, Ninon warped out of harm's way, leaving Diana to halt her swift dash before she lost balance.
A teleport for a teleport left the 'Diamond Guardian' getting frustrated on beyond a single spectrum. "Damn... this girl's no slouch..."
Predicting the direction of the attack upon the witch's return, Diana threw her arms back over her shoulder, bringing the blade over her back (while trying not to harm herself with it) in a backwards guard.
Once she returned into the physical realm, Ninon had a moment to see Diana's blocking position – and refused her even the satisfaction to catch the attack within the clutches of her defense. Instead, Ninon went very low with a jabbing heel-stomp that caught Diana on one of her ankles.
Diana gritted her teeth and fought through the ache as she tried to shove herself backwards against her opponent – but she felt the witch brace upon the ground, and opted to work off the placement of her sabre, which was stabbing into the ground ever so slighty, and flipped herself backwards. Vaulting over the young dark witch, Diana wound up behind Ninon...
...only to feel the opponent literally warp through her and out of her grasp. She almost felt the aura of the dark Beart sister shiver her bones as she clinched onto her sword.
From Ninon's vanishing spell off of this instance, Diana had no clue of which direction she was going to come from this time, and her blade pointed all around the place in the growing piece of frustration and paranoia she was coping with. Eventually, her eyes landed on Elisabeth, who stood at watch this whole time, at the middle of the stairwell.
"You seriously gonna let that little brat try and mess with me like this?" Diana's weapon was nearly pointing out at the Frenchwoman.
Elisabeth sneered, seeing a little bit of patheticness seeping through in the observed fighter. "I'm simply the hostess, Diana. It's your problem to deal with by hand, not mine."
Diana sighed, finding it hard to keep full respect with the fight-runner. "I swear, I'd expect you have more of a handle on this sh—urgh!"
A slice of magic warped past the previously stepped-on ankle of Diana, officially knocking her into a half-kneel, as Ninon slid back into reality with her artificial weapon welcomely handled.
"Don't you see, agent? The hostess has more respect for class and potential more than just style over substance." Ninon's eyes glared with an evil glint towards the hostess. "Care to admit it, milady?"
"I can't hold bias, Beart. Even if you or your sister have plenty of potential." Though she could admit the potential factor, Elisabeth had more than a mind to also admit just how eccentric the Beart family might be on the basis of the young ladies in the bloodline.
Of course, it wasn't just that – whether there's a win or a loss for the witch was a part of the matter...
The Shiki/Momoko bout was really starting to even up in pace, as the two spent a good chunk of time since where it was left off pacing over one another with lots of maneuverability incorporated.
Shiki crawled with slow sinister thoughtfulness, examining the opposition, body part by body part, seeking out what was likely the most vulnerable; meanwhile, Momoko bounced around like a monkey experiencing a sugar high, feet and hands hobbling around the floor with a varied number actually touching said floor from second to second.
Shiki got in close first in this phase of the encounter, sprinting shortly before crossing her arms in a side-to-side slash at her, but it got barely anything against Momoko's tiny, hard-to-hit body; at most, the time-lost femme fatale could've clipped the big pink belt that held Momo's loose shirt in place.
Momoko met up on the milliseconds Shiki would lose, with a front-vault into a handstand, in the middle of which she casually curved leg and plopped a foot atop the top of Shiki's head. It didn't exactly knock her where she stood, but it did catch her attention, just as Momoko flipped backwards through a handspring/cartwheel conversion to escape the close range battle for just a moment.
Shiki caught up quick to her target, dipped low and flung her legs in a crescent sweep to try and knock the girl off her feet – it looked like a success at first once she connected with Momoko's ankles...
...but a dance-fighter does what a dance-fighter can do, and Momoko used the momentum of her body landing back-first and her legs flopping inwards, to kip back up and over with the same wooshing force against gravity. Of course, she wasn't without a stumble, potentially leaving an opening for her opponent.
Thankfully for Momo', she managed to make a quick leap out of the way of Shiki's dive-in, scampering off and away from the fight. Her travels led her towards and up a wall with her amusingly wild maneuverability, as she ran and sprung off the wall with a flip just as Shiki was chasing her, causing the snake-tattooed fighter to nearly slam herself into the wall if it wasn't for the swords she shanked against the hard surface to stifle momentum.
Momoko nearly fell out of balance upon landing from the backflip, barely skidding away on her butt as she fumbled her way back into her combat stance. With the opening presented to her, Momoko managed to get in a dropkick against the cursed ink upon Shiki's back. It gathered less pain than attention as Shiki looked over her shoulder in the midst of extracting her swords from the wall, and at the while, Momoko's dancing feet were dancing harder than ever.
"Here we go~!" Momoko cheered to mostly herself as she charged forward and laid in another stabbing kick against Shiki's chest.
The placement of her foot allowed her to bounce off Shiki's bosom like a trampoline, spinning back into an almost-graceful landing as she continued to face off against the threatening opponent with non-stop kicks.
On the other end, Shiki was not going to just take the punishment where she stood – not for herself, for those who call to her, or for her future-born. Before she was in too deep against the peppy Psycho-Powered girl's combo, the fearless competitor was already suppressing the attack with one of her own once she laid the swords forward with a blunt-side cross-strike. The blades came wildly and swiftly, though it was mostly the dark, ravaging aura that did the work of pressing down damage.
One of the swipes of the blade brought wind to drag Momoko briefly upwards, until she choicelessly landed upon Shiki's swords, which thankfully for the dancer only pierced underneath and through the sleeve holes of her shirt. The fear of actual impalement was out of the way, but Momoko was still stuck in the grasp of Shiki's katanas as she carried her forward towards the back end of the room.
The swords slowly threatened to cross against Momoko's body as she was eventually pinned against that wall, kicking helplessly as she started to feel the breath out of Shiki's pale body as she leaned up on the girl.
"You... you remind me..." Shiki's shivery voice gasped out. "Of what I want my child to be..."
"Wha... what...!?" All this little bit of knowledge into her opponent's personal beliefs was getting Momoko was 'stranger danger' red-flags.
"Shhhh..." Shiki raised a very untrustworthy finger to the lips of the girl. "Not by my full choice, I can spare you of pain... and if you want, I can raise you to be my own kin..."
"N-no!" Momoko struggled even harder. "That's really, really not okay with me, ma'am!"
"I won't mean you harm anymore if you give in," Shiki reasoned. "Look into these eyes and see a woman who struggles to feel alive..."
Though attempting to seem sincere in a way, all Shiki was succeeding in, was unintentionally being terrifyingly predatory. Naturally, Momoko put all her efforts in wanting out of this grasp before it got any worse for her.
Momoko's spirit remained defiant, even through the period of intimidation and just otherwise uncomfortableness squeezing down on her like cinderblocks slowly burying over her, brick-by-brick. Desperate times meant looking deeper within herself, and finding just a bit more of that Psycho Power she needed to escape as much as she could.
"Go away!" With a desperate outstretch with her arms, another shockwave of power came bursting through from Momoko's palms, right in Shiki's face.
From the looks of things, the outburst of energy may have been more than intended, since within a few seconds, the whole room was enveloped in nothing but a pink light...
Back to the other end of this showcase...
Ninon was savoring the moment on top, her smile reserved and her stare cold on her opponent.
On the other hand, Diana had yet to get back into things with the fight, having been suppressed in her movement with one rough connection at the ankle – her leg was nearly crumpled in protectively, and she was unwillingly easing towards a grasp for mercy...
"I feel your time in this match is already winding down to its last thread," Ninon claimed. "That is, unless you think otherwise."
Diana wasn't at all looking forwards to a defeat. Not when she had plenty of reason to go forwards in this tournament – the primary being redemption in picking things up where Kula left off.
She retorted... "I'm thinkin' I'll think... the way I'd want to think." She was probably better off wording it better, but she knew exactly what she'd like to day. "And do you want to know what I think?"
"That I'm evil?" Ninon's arms rested '''innocently''' behind as she approached a little closer... "That I'm a bad influence?"
Stomp! With barely a care for the person she had the advantage over, Ninon dropped a foot onto Diana's dominant hand, pinning it against the ground with a ruthless intent, and a pinching poke from the back, around the opposite point of where Diana's palm would be.
Ninon admitted with a shrug... "Maybe. But I'm in the right."
Crunching some of the rival's hand under her boot, as close as she could get to popping a knuckle or other miscellaneous hand bone beneath, Ninon let it scrape backwards against the skin, lingering her leg...
...and then swinging it back forwards, right across the side of Diana's head. The surprising power in that wind-up kick had the potential to knock an eyeball past its lids, but that was only one of the worse scenarios, one which wasn't where Diana approached, thankfully. Regardless, she was nearly fully down on the ground, but wasn't spared her consciousness quite yet.
"When was the last time you were relevant, Ms. Diana?" Ninon interrogated, the witch pacing about in front of the adversary laying before her. "...Come to think of it, when was anybody in your squad last relevant, in or out of the King of Fighters tournaments? NESTS has been a thing of the past for more than a decade now. Are you still that desperate to cling onto destiny even when it had died down so long ago? I mean... I wouldn't be surprised, considering now the whole lot of you have spent your time hanging onto the coattails of the military."
"For a little shit, you've got a big load to talk about..." Diana grunted. "I think you might know... urgh~... a little too much."
"If only..." Ninon tapped Diana on the chin with the very tip of one of her heavy-soled boots. "I'd dream of knowing more than anyone in your guild ever would. The thing is, my knowledge comes from not science... but from Hell, Heaven, and wherever realms of death in between the cracks of Earth and the clouds of the sky."
The witch spoke as though Diana would give a damn about Heaven, Hell, or whatever religious undertones that were lingering between the lips of the little brat. The NESTS alumnus was keeping a desperate hold onto her weaponry, her sanity, and her fighting spirit at the moment, and even as she was being leveled against her condition and footing, she was still trying to fight through the pain.
Ninon raised an eyebrow of intrigue, seeing the opponent start to climb back up to where she half-kneeled a couple moments before. "Oh? You're still trying to get up? Maybe you're not so washed up..."
Diana gritted her teeth with frustration against the youth. "Kids these days... just keep judging... and never understanding what us ladies are all about."
She plucked her sabre off the ground and looked ready to slash once she got over the pain of her attacked ankle. She climbed back to her feet under the power of her good leg, and prepared the backhand swipe.
"This ends he—!" VWOOSH!
A spurt of pink light soared in from the right, maintaining for a moment before fading off quickly...
CRASH! A sound of a wall crashing in on itself was heard off to the left, and at the same time came the dust clearing out from where Diana had stood – emphasis on 'stood', as she was gone in the next moment once that abrupt beam came and went.
...and cratered in that demolished wall, implied out of the brutal sounds.
Ninon stood and blinked against the sight between where Diana was previously and where she was now. The pale little witch was... unsurprisingly unfazed by what just happened.
"Just as I thought – too little foresight in that body, to maintain eyes on the back of her head..." Definitely took weight off having to spend further effort taking down the guardian fencer herself. Her eyes were now focused at the smoke and soot clearing out from the next room ahead.
'Ground zero' of the blast was surprisingly not as destroyed as you'd expect. It was with great relief the beam chose to soar through the doorway than through any walls.
The originator of the unintended destruction, Momoko, was not much better in condition as those she hit with what she had. Her shirt was now with a couple tears where the katanas of her opponent hooked under and through, and was starting to look in a condition where it could fall fully off if it wasn't for the big pink belt hooking 'round. Her hair flopped out of place in spots, and her headband was about to fall off of her head. Just nothing but a sweating heap, and some soot and dust over her face from the point-blank fire at her foe.
Speaking of, from the initial sight of things, there was no sight of Shiki...
...until she casually phased back into the room in a warp of blue, looking barely mangled. Even in the slightest of windows to escape, it seemed she was able to handle it – almost unvexingly so.
Unlike Momoko and the power she held – with a single nudge to the back from her opponent, she unconsciously flopped face-down, out of it before she was fully down on the ground.
Shiki took a moment to briefly lament over the fainted potential that she stood over. "What a shame..." She then started to saunter past, face resting neutral and pace fairly unhurried.
The first thing that caught Ninon's pinkish-red eyes were the mismatched red and blue of Shiki's. From first sight, her attention was gained. "Well-well... what do we have here?" She approached without caution.
Shiki kept her guard down and her focus completely upon Ninon, and the witch met back with unclenched fists, no intent just yet until she knew a little more of what she was dealing with. An invisible stream of curiosity linked the two of them, from one pair of eyes to another, scanning just a little bit into the soul of one another...
Bearing witness to the final two standing toe-to-toe not too far from her position, Elisabeth was a slight cautious with how she was hoping things would turn out. Her pure soul could recognize the threat the darkness shared between Ninon and Shiki...
Meanwhile, after subtly removing herself from center focus in the scenery alongside the hostess, Chizuru slowly made her way back into the scene after her time to observe ended just as the Shiki vs. Momoko fight did, clearing through what little of the blast's smoke remained. Just one of a few who were up to witness what came next with those who remained...
As soon as she caught her cohort out of the corner of the room, Elisabeth spoke out. "Keep your distance for a moment, Ms. Kagura. I sense combustible elements could be in play."
Chizuru nodded silently, taking a few steps into the back corner near the doorway in the hopes that the sinister aura that she felt from there wasn't too built with potential to harm with collateral damage.
The rest of this intriguing bout had yet to kick back into full gear... and only God knows how it could turn out.
Welp, now it's sort of a three-parter. I guess. Also I'm kinda worried some of my sorta-writer's-block struggles bled off onto my fellow writers in the KoF fandom. I at least managed to get in the latter few thousand words down within the past couple days.
Next Chapter: A battle of dark vixens closes out the qualifier bout – but the chaos doesn't end there...!