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((Cause Gaia may delete the posts you made in the other thread if anyone posts anymore in it.))

Luckily for Tenkai, he wouldn't have to fight much against the attack - the bolt wasn't a continuous thing, it was a flash of sound and fury, shock and explosive force, and then it was gone. Unlike other fighters, Deitric could not maintain a continual ranged lashing of electrical power, limited to physically delivering the charge or occasionally throwing bolts of lightning like morning-star bright javelins of light. It would have been impossibly draining on him.

The warrior was trying to piece together his perception of the world around him and gather his bearings when he felt something crash into his upper body and knock him back into the ropes with an all-too-human grunt of pain. The blade of air had sliced neatly into the black leather of his jacket and left a shallow nick along his right shoulder, but no blood spilled from his torso where he should have been sliced from hip to shoulder.

Something metallic glimmered beneath the leather of his jacket; a jack of plates that he wore to protect him from bladed weapons. Light-weight and affording some decent amount of protection, the metal plating that was set between the thin layers of leather of the under-jack had held against the scything airblade. Armor aside, he inwardly winced - feeling the armor crease into his torso stung and bruised his skin along the line the attack had slashed into his jacket.

Deitric's focus returned, his eyes sharpening on the image of the swordsman in front of him as the brave rebounded from the ropes a few feet. He looked only a little worse for wear thanks to the armor he had kept hidden for nearly every single round, standing with his front to his opponent. Without a sound, the champion steeled his gaze and waved for the tribesman to continue with his right hand, letting it fall to his waist while the tomahawk swung in and out lazily in the left, as if baiting the sword blade to draw near.

If Tenkai's opponent felt any mutual curiosity about technique or origin, it was lost in the impassive mask of his facial features. The tribesman was a thoughtful man, and one of little words; less so in the midst of combat. He hadn't the breath to waste on words.

Unlike his opponent's relative inexperience with the tomahawk and how it could be used, Deitric had had some encounters with the sort of sword that the monk was using. He wasn't a swordsman himself by any definition of the word, but after having enough people swing swords at him that resembled the one Tenkai held, he had learned some of the ins and outs of the weapon.

With the monk's two handed grip on the sword and the way he had it pointed towards the ground, the brave didn't need much time to figure out he wouldn't be able to block whatever attack Tenkai had prepared - two hands swinging a weapon were generally better than one trying to block it, especially from such an angle.

Wary of the silvery blade of the sword, Deitric let Tenkai swing the glimmer of steel between them, quickly retracting his arm to avoid the blow - but not his body. He had no doubt that the monk was fast with his weapon, and that trying to swing his own in some sort of direct retaliation probably wouldn't have worked.

Instead, as the sword's blade came up, Deitric barreled in low abruptly, ducking beneath the upswing of the sword to try and plow his shoulders into Tenkai's waist or upper-legs and drive him to the ground, aiming to hook his tomahawk around the man's right ankle to yank it out of place in combination with his own bodily force. It had its risks; he knew the monk could bring the swing around and give him a lashing across the back if he were fast enough, but the exchange of eliminating the sword's effective range and getting the other man to the ground would have been worth it.

For once, however, the dark skinned hadn't exactly planned ahead - the aim was to force the man to the ground where his tomahawk could do some good. He was careful to avoid the normal pitfalls - getting the head into a choking position, getting the arms caught under the body, and so forth - but that was training, not forethought.

It seemed that Deitric was flying almost by instinct. He could always improvise, if he didn't get a sword jammed into his back for his trouble.

Swooping in to try and take Tenkai down, Deitric showcased something very few people anticipated from him: practiced skill, like that of a martial artist. Many opponents - most of them, in fact - mistook the tribesman as a brawler working on instinct and raw talent, but he was more than that. His people had a well developed system of grappling and striking, and shooting in to take his opponent down was one of the basic essentials.

Of the few tenets that involved training to take an opponent down was that you always put your head on the outside of their hip as quickly as possible to leverage them to the ground with the pull of your arms and push of your shoulders. It protected the face, most especially the eyes.

The monk had reacted quicker than anticipated, but the target he was aiming for disappeared in a wash of black hair and leather as the tribesman's training slipped his head to the outside of the hip, leaving his sword's hilt to jab down into Deitric's right shoulder. While this wasn't nearly as stunning as getting jammed in the head with a sword hilt, it was still painful to have it crack against your shoulder blade all the same.

When the two men bodily collided, Deitric immediately yanked back on his tomahawk to try and pull the swordsman's leg out from under him and send him bowling over. Even though it looked successful, the champion couldn't get both legs wrapped up, and instead of going forward, he sprang up awkwardly with so much force that he stumbled back, having gone from trying to heave Tenkai over to having no weight on his shoulder at all made his spine straighten like a whipcord.

The tribesman's features scrunched slightly in what might have been confusion or consternation. He turned and threw his tomahawk hard, sending the weapon hurtling towards one of the posts behind Tenkai with a buzz in the air behind it, the blade jamming deep into the post, leaving Deitric unarmed.

It seemed as though the weapon - or its use - had only bothered him, and for the time being he felt better off with his hands. He could have re-belted the weapon, but throwing was a challenge; but Deitric wasn't looking to match steel, but fist and brawn and any other sort of power they could muster.

He motioned for Tenkai to stand, and stepped away to clearly indicate he would allow the monk to rise.

Deitric looked down at his hands while they clinched into tightly balled fists, and then looked at Tenkai.

He shrugged lightly.

"These are my weapons," he countered, bringing his hands up in front of him into a loose guard, his right side inched forward slightly. For whatever reason, the tribesman seemed unwilling to use his tomahawks - perhaps because Tenkai was unarmored, and the weapons were lethal in many instances. On the other hand, his body wasn't - not usually.

And there he stood; waiting.

While Tenkai moved to re-sheath his sword, the tribesman unzipped his jacket - slashed and bloodied as it was - and removed it. The armor he wore on his upper-body followed shortly after, folding the under-jack up and tossing it behind his shoulder in a surprisingly neat heap of leather and metal. He wouldn't need it, after all.

He came up to a loose guard with his hands in front of him around the level of his chin, his head tucking down in the typical fighter's stance. Deitric moved forward, matching his opponent's advance easily. His legs bounded him forward, shifting his body-weight left, then right, before his leading right hand lanced out quickly, aiming to test the monk by rapping his knuckles against the man's guard.

Without drawn steel, Deitric seemed to move much more fluidly - as if the thought of accidentally killing one another becoming a fairly implausible task had loosened him up. His eyes glared brightly behind his fists, but like his body language it remained relaxed and calm. Not amiable or aggressive, just there, and nothing more.

[Sorry about not posting; had some relationship problems that left me in a pretty bad mood for most of yesterday.]

In the back of his mind, Deitric knew that Tenkai was doing the same thing he would have done. Move to the outside of an opponent's guard, rather than in - it was generally safer, and offered more opportunities for attack. But, at the time, it wasn't something he consciously thought of - his mind was working elsewhere.

The tribesman's right hand rotated at the wrist, as if the now-open palm was going to try and grab Tenkai's wrist. Whether or not this was so, it wasn't key to the champion's plans - he was just wanting his opponent to see the danger there, and not elsewhere.

Because the brave did something that very rarely happened.

He threw a kick.

When the monk came in outside Deitric's guard, he had allowed it, but had made sure the swordsman didn't go too far to his flank, maintaining the "touching guard" they had had while his right foot came up swiftly, cocked like the hammer before it shot out, aiming to "stomp kick" Tenkai in the side below his raised right arm. The motion was fairly fluid, despite the rarity of such attacks by the tribesman and that it was a sort of brutish attack - he had been trained in the use of both hands and feet as weapons, but it was so rare that he threw any manner of kicks, most assumed he couldn't.

But, as it was, he could throw kicks - and they generally hurt a whole lot.

Deitric's steel-shod heel clipped Tenkai, but he didn't get the full force of the blow he would have liked. His foot came down to the floor, and he felt something brush along his side, something that instantly went from a grazing touch to a sledgehammer of force being driven through his abdomen.

The force shredded the right, bottom portion of Deitric's plain white shirt, the skin breaking beneath while an angry bruise blossomed outward from the point of 'impact' as if someone had just struck him with a bludgeon. The champion made a distinct sound that was almost as if he was gagging on bile, blood dribbling out of his clenched teeth as he was laid low, dropping down to a knee.

Pain caused his vision to whiten near the edges as if someone were shining a light into his eyes, and his head swam. It was rare that someone could ever lay him low - the last time he had ever felt such an intensely concentrated pain was when a red-hot musketball had torn into his flesh. The two pains were similar, but the lack of heat, burning, and no smell of acrid flesh set them apart.

But just as there was a difference in the nuances of the pains, there was a difference in the two experiences. Through the pain and the sickness that was welling up from his battered guts, the black-haired tribesman knew one thing.

He didn't need to see Tenkai to hit him - the man was right beside him, and the champion had a deathgrip on the man's arm. He had been laid low for only a moment.





There was no thought of his own danger, or how hurt he was. No idea about whether or not the wound he had received had done more damage to the inside of him than out - there was only the iron will that Deitric had used to bend the world to his knee time and again. He relied on nothing other than the sheer will to win in the face of adversity - as all humans must at some point in their lives in the world of Gaia, when posed against such things as demons and vampires.

No pause, no hesitation. The blow dropped Deitric to a kneel, and for only a split second he seemed lost and gone before he exploded into motion. Yanking Tenkai down - or pulling himself up by the man's arm, perhaps - the tribesman's left hand shot upward with an awful power behind it as he threw his entire weight upwards into the blow while rising to his feet behind it.



Aiming to slam his fist squarely him into the monk's ribs beneath his arms, Deitric appeared on the resurgent, his fist igniting on contact with an awesome show of power as a blindingly bright blast of raw, elemental lightning seemed to erupt from his entire arm, aiming to blast into the swordsman with enough force to rip their arm-grips apart and send the other man flying, a backwash of energy playing out across both of them as ball lightning spontaneously erupted around the building they were fighting in.

"ORAAAAUUUGH!"

There was a booming, boneshatteringly deep thundercrack sounding with the strike of the blow - if it indeed struck - as the warrior poured all of his pooled energy into forcing as much physical and metaphysical force as possible into the blow, as if he were literally punching with one of Olympian Zeus's thunderbolts held in his hand.

If the blow struck and the two men were separated by the stupendous force behind the attack, Deitric would be left half-standing on his own, wobbling as if he were about to fall to a kneel. His left arm was a mess of angry, red welts that distorted his tattooed skin. The arm hung limply at his side in pain, smoke curling up from the appendage in loose, lazy trails, the ashes of the glove he had worn on the hand fluttering away while the steel caps that had been placed over his knuckles click-clapped to the ground at his feet, taking bits of burnt skin with them.

The warrior's chest rose and fell heavily, aspirating blood from his mouth in a fine crimson mist, the glow in his eyes regularly growing and dimming in time with his breathing. The wound on his side looked as if it were already beginning to swell angrily, while blood dribbled lazily from the point of impact at his side. How hurt he truly was would have been hard to measure - but suffice to say, he was in a great deal of pain. But, if he had caught Tenkai by surprise - or if not surprise, at least by the fact that they were locked together in arm's reach - then he would have repaid the favor tenfold.

[If the pictures are oversized, let me know so I can correct them.]