The cold eyes of scorpion stared down the two Earthrealm mortals with apathy and narrowed with each step the two took toward him.
"You will go no further." Scorpion stopped them in their tracks.
"We must." Nightwolf returned and Scorpion's response was to swing the spear toward him with great force. Kotal Kahn thrust in front and caught the chain at the cost of the spear's rebound striking his right shoulder blade.
"Explain yourself, specter!" Ko'atal yanked Scorpion forward, but try as he may to test Scorpion's might, the black and yellow ninja would not budge.
"You do not belong in the Nether Realm."
"Jade belongs to me and I will do what I must to get her, don't you understand, Hanzo?" He added, "the need to get back what you've lost?"
"It cannot be done." The reach for his heart gave Scorpion no pause for he held no heart. "Leave, or you end up like Quan Chi."
"Then we end up like the sorcerer." Nightwolf spat and charged forward.
The chain fell slack as a flame encased the specter and the weapon was dropped in favor of appearing behind Nightwolf to strike him from behind.
Ko'atal began to swing the chains over his head counter clockwise and whipped them toward Scorpion after a long pause to measure the specter in combat with the Matokan.
No cattle, Scorpion sliced the chains to shattered pieces with a swift swing of his katana that then pivoted with a step to come down on Nightwolf, but the Matokan had side stepped as well and dodged the blade for a kick to the dead's gut.
Should the world swell like the sea in the sky, Nightwolf would draw from the energy of the Earth to cast a great lightning down upon Scorpion, but here he only had his fists. He grappled with the specter's sword hand until the two danced toward Ko'atal. Unable to break the pressure in Scorpion's lifeless wrist, and impossible to break his stamina, Nightwolf served only to push Scorpion into a stalemate between the two. He knew the specter would win, but when?
Chain shortened, Ko'atal tightened that spin and only unleashed when the two were close enough and split the yellow and black padded fabric over Scorpion's left shoulder. Nightwolf used the distraction to twist and flip the dead over his shoulder and onto the cracked ground beneath. His boot crashed down onto the salt of the earth, engulfed in the withered flames of Scorpion's essence and the specter appeared before Ko'atal with the blade drawn and focused between his eyes.
"If you cannot convince yourself, then how do you expect hell itself to let you through?" Scorpion spat as the two crossed their guards. The blade sliced along the sanded flesh of Ko'atals forearm, but he bared it long enough to return those words with his own.
Ko'atal gritted and spat and bleed his heart before the specter, "if you cannot understand my resolve, then I will kill you over and over again to get to her."
Slice!
Scorpion ducked out of the hold pulled downward on the blade to cut Ko'atal clean only to aim it back at Nightwolf who had thought to come into their fight circle.
Ko'atal cursed the hell around him and braced his arm as blood flowed line wine down the sheath of muscle and veins, the flesh barely held to them after he had been scraped and dined on by the Oni.
With only the two of them to tango, Scorpion and Nightwolf clashed again. Nightwolf now had the katana to contend against and his movements more evasive with steps, half steps, pivots and cross overs to Scorpion's drag steps, lunges and swings. The only problem with defending against the dead is that the specter did not obey the laws of physics, nor did the Nether Realm.
In a great bellowing maw of flame, Scorpion stepped back and came down from behind Nightwolf at an angle, boot to the face and blade there to follow to meet the Earth just missing the Matokan.
Nightwolf swept at Scorpion's feet and pulled himself back to a standing right stance, but the specter had vanished. Unable to fall into neutral stance just yet, Nightwolf scanned the plateau for the Shirai Ryu. He rushed to the center and watched the skies, the earth, and kept an ear open for the fires that would cackle and sizzle should the specter emerge.
Hiss!
The fires spat open and a spear flung straight for Nightwolf. There was no means to dodge from behind with no knowledge, but he turned quick as he could to catch it as best he could in as least deadly a spot as possible. Inside Ko'atal.
The Osh Tekk pushed himself in front of the Matokan and took the spear to the chest, his upper left side more into the shoulder than the chest itself.
"Get over here!"
The spear, with great force like a raging bull was pulled back and flung the massive body of the muscular Osh Tekk clean off the plateau. With the spear ripped from his flesh it caught back in Scorpion's grasp just in time to consume Nightwolf in the flames of a portal that Ko'atal reached desperately to stop as his body crashed like a ship into the deep depths of the earth.
He landed with a heavy thud and thunderous cracks of salt and bone. The very earth beneath him screamed as it was impaled with Ko'atal's flesh.
The grey sky above hummed like a feeble drone that watched over him as he could only stare back at it. Scorpion had vanished completely from this plane, but so too did Nightwolf. Where they had gone, he couldn't tell, but he remained a dead anchor on the ground floor of the desert plane of hell.
A quick jerk of his eyes as the world begin to blur, he watched as those pale, sickening amorphous forms began to claw out of the ground, from the fields beyond the rocks and gnaw close with their claws and teeth.
Closer and closer they crawled as the still body waited.
Jade.
His only thought, perhaps his last.
When his eyes closed, the world faded with him.