[h2] Erubescan Citadel [/h2]


[i]The air was like trying to breathe boiling mud. Thick with smoke and plaster dust and heat. Her chest burned as she tore across a shattered wall of concrete, leaving the surface scarred with blood and scorchmarks. 

She was furious. Angry. How dare he. How dare he come to her Kingdom. Her city. After all this. After she'd conceded. After those bastards had taken everything from her that was important. Everything. And it still wasn't enough. It would never be enough. You couldn't walk away. Couldn't just hope they'd leave you alone. This VERMIN would never stop until someone EXTERMINATED them. 

The explosion had catapulted her out of the window for the second time today. Hot blood dripped from her eyes and from her mouth, beginning to boil and hiss when it hit the Knight's skin. The wounds she'd received in the first bouts of the fight had already cauterized from sheer heat her skin was putting out. The shattered remnants of her knight suit and helmet hung from her body as she ran, already rendered useless but the impacts that came before. She could feel the pounding of her heart in her head and in her stomach as her legs kept a pace beyond any sense of apprehension, leaping over a fallen girder and letting loose a feral snarl of frustration. 

WHERE WAS HE

Fire. Concrete. Shredded bits of chairs and tables. 

Movement. 

A figure trying to pick itself up. But it was pinned. A roof support on top of it, jagged ends digging into its back. He was trapped.

This wasn't good. 

This wasn't honourable. 

This was burning out poison before it spread. 

This was was for the good of everyone. 

THIS WAS JUSTICE.

With a screaming battle cry she leapt at the fallen figure, seized his neck in her hands, and-

 [/i]

FLASH

"Okay that looks pretty gnarly but maybe a bit more of a smile, we're going for hero, right?"

Kora blinked through the camera flare and awkwardly nodded. 
Honestly one of the easier parts of soldiering was that you really very rarely had to work out what to do with your face. Attempting to look intimidating and majestic but also friendly and marketable was the kind of conundrum that rarely came up in her career. 

Though now it seemed to apparently comprise a lot of it. 

Photoshoot for the new recruitment drive. 

Join the Knights. Join the Fight.

Who better to head it up than the Knighthood's new red-headed posterchild. 

Erubescan social media had gone wild that day, three weeks back, when a number of crowds had filmed Kora fighting a gifted terrorist in New Camelot's commercial district. Like some comic book superhero. Being thrown from a second floor window only to pick herself up and run back in again, pausing to blast flying rubble away from fleeing civilians.  The ever hungry publicity machine of Citadel propaganda could not have asked for a better story. 

Kora, for her own part, had really not realised the impact that her part in the fight had had, well, not until  several days later when she'd awoken in the Citadel infirmary with lots of stitches, and arm in plaster, and a really excessive number of bouquets of flowers sent to her from people she'd never met before. It had been a pretty surreal experience, and took a lot of getting used to. 

Was still taking a lot of getting used to. 

Especially the photo stuff. 

She found herself posing amid some mock-up of the ruined library that had made up the arena of her final showdown, albeit far more artfully distressed. She was also a lot more artfully distressed, with one slender cut across her cheekbone painted on in make-up and a small amount of powdered ash dusted around the waves of her hair. Bits of the modified Knight gear she were wearing, clearly just recently out of the box, were lightly tattered at the edges. The cape and the claymore were also rather peculiar artistic liberties. 

Why had they given her a claymore. Claymores were Scottish, not Scandinavian.

Least it wasn't a horned helmet, she supposed.