Roll up, roll up!!
Come one, come all, and witness a most wondrous dueling performance!
Featuring:
The Witch
and
Troupe Master Grimm
With credit to @Drifting Pollen and @Lugubrious for descriptive prose.
“…What if I want to burn the child as well?” All jests aside, she'd quite enjoyed the ringmaster's poem. The pointless scribblings of so-called artists had never much appealed to the Witch, but when a verse contained so many of her own interests—
nightmares and visions and flames, oh my—even she couldn’t help but crack a grin. Who’d have thought that this circus would ever prove so entertaining?
A shame they likely all wanted to murder her, though she was hardly unused to being reviled. Now, should she make a break for it? Those stretching shadows had been warning enough of the impending threat, and the Witch already stood poised to make her escape. On the other hand, she knew a narrow girl like her would never outrun all those hovering bugs, no matter how desperately she fled.
She could stand and fight, then, unleash her power and show these bugs why she was so rightly feared. Their numbers might seem overwhelming, but her spells were well-suited for dealing with clustered crowds, and she hadn’t yet exhausted all her tricks. On the other hand, she’d just seen an enemy casually shrug off one of her fireballs, and wasn’t in the mood to try her luck again. That left only Grimm, and his inexplicable invitation.
The Witch had always been too curious for her own good. That this tall gentleman’s offer was so strange, and so very likely dangerous, only made it all the more enticing to her. Over the whispers and chatter of the audience, over the sweet wet music of her undead slaves doing battle, the Witch sauntered forth to meet the Troupe Master midway.
He bowed, and she nodded her head in return to him. Already tongues of fire swirled up around her in anticipation, ready to set things off with a bang.
Her acceptance seemed to excite the crowd of Grimmkin, igniting a fresh round of eager whispers, and the perimeter of ghostly bugs receded a few feet from the impromptu dance floor to make sure the duelists had enough space. With his polite gesture uninterrupted and over with, Grimm whirled around, then disappeared in a flare of scarlet flame. He reappeared just as suddenly at the Witch's four o'clock position, his arm -itself long enough to reach his knee- already extended with his cape hanging from it it like a membranous wing. Though black on the outside, the odd cloth featured an inner lining of bright, pale red, much like the Troupe master's eyes, and it squirmed with the fitful glow of a sputter candle.
"Ssair." At Grimm's unintelligible rasp, a winged sprite of living flame darted forth like a wrathful magpie, its blazing wings a blur as it hurtled toward its creator's adversary. After a brief, a second firebat surged out after the first, and a third followed its predecessor immediately. Like the Shadows' fireballs they changed course to hunt the Witch down. Their much greater speed made them harder to react to, but easier to evade. Regardless of whether or not they hit, though, Grimm continued his dance. Only a moment after releasing his cloak, he teleported into the air, where he hung suspended for a moment as he wrapped his cloak about him. The next instant he hurled himself down at the Witch in a corkscrew dive, a javelin in the night, but his wounded leg would greatly impede his landing.
The sorceress may have allowed Grimm his bow, but that was all the mercy she would grant him. The moment he started to spin, her wand flicked upwards in a sharp gesture and sent a bolt of fire screaming his way. The merest instant before it landed, however, the Troupe Master vanished into the air, and left her scrambling to find her target.
Where?? She whirled about, eyes blazing blue, but with the audience as a backdrop every direction seemed nearly the same. It was his voice that alerted her, and drew her attention just soon enough to snap off a kinetic attack at the first sprite. The translucent arrow pierced a hole clean through the living flame and left the rest to burn away, though by now another was already streaking towards her. The Witch shot again—a miss—and then lunged to the side, anticipating the worst after her earlier experience with homing attacks. Her caution proved well-founded, and she made it just wide enough to avoid the second darting wisp of flame.
Unfortunately, the Witch wasn’t known for her speed. The third sprite had already adjusted its trajectory, and this time she couldn’t dodge quick enough to slip past it entirely. The projectile grazed the edge of her invisible barrier and left it glowing with residual heat, already a little thinner than before.
With her attention occupied by Grimm’s sequential attacks, she barely had time to react to his following move. With spiraling black death bearing down on her from above, her body responded on instinct, an ungainly dive that left her sprawled on the ground with limbs askew. She’d landed hard enough that it actually took another fraction out of her shield—but it got her clear, and with her barrier receiving the pain for her she recovered almost instantly. Her wand twitched again, and a blinding orange light filled the short space between the Witch and the grounded Grimm as a second fireball roared forth to greet him.
Hampered by the half-crushed leg that nearly buckled beneath him from the force of his dive, Grimm remained crouched long enough that by the time he rose, the Witch's fireball couldn't be avoided. It splashed against his cloak with an angry hiss, leaving the fibers scarred and smoldering, but even in this state the Troupe Master did not stagger so easily.
"Hhagh!" Springing off his good leg, he through himself into a second corkscrew lunge, this time purely horizontal. Even if he couldn't put together a proper offense against the Witch's magic, and his injury slowed him down somewhat, his relentless offense would put the Witch's reactions and agility to the test. If his opponent couldn't find a way to seize control of this dance, it would certainly be Grimm dictating its unsustainable pace.
When the momentum of the spiral arrow petered out after about twenty feet, Grimm's cloak unwound and he slid to a stop in a crouching position, vulnerable for a brief moment. Like smoke, however, he soon vanished from the Witch's clutches. He teleported once more, and when he flared back into existence a split second later, he got his bearings and surged toward his foe with something new: a sweeping overhead claw slash, followed after a split second by an unaimed upward slice that carried him into the air. Then, once silhouetted against the night sky, the Troupe Master exploded like a fireworks display, four plumes of scarlet flame raining down across the arena. He reappeared a a short distance away, searching for his dance partner amidst the dazzling blaze.
A sapphire gleam flashed across the spellcaster's eyes, even as her teeth clenched together so hard they could break. Here, in the thick of battle, she felt perhaps more alive than anywhere else, in tune with the mayhem around her. Funny, that she should only see so clearly with death so close at hand.
She'd noticed how Grimm seemed to be favoring one leg, the other twisted out of its proper shape. Vital knowledge, but it wouldn't have saved her from that second lunging attack. Her rescue came from circumstance, luck, and Grimm's own haste: he struck before she could even fully rise to her feet, but did not think to strike
downward as he had before.
The Witch dropped straight back into a sprawling position, flattened tight against the ground. Rather than spear her through, the lunging ringmaster shot right over her and quite possibly tripped himself up in the doing. Far too close for comfort, but she was adapting to his speed now: the instant he passed by she rolled onto her back and shot him from behind with a translucent missile.
Too late. He'd disappeared again, and she hit only smoke. A bothersome trick, but she'd seen it once and wouldn't fall so easily again. Her legs kicked out to the side, and her body spun up into a sitting position before he came tearing at her with razor-sharp bug-claws bared.
A more skilled fighter might have tried to parry and riposte; the Witch simply scurried backwards as fast as she could manage. Her foe was quicker, and his first strike again grazed her barrier before she swayed just shy of the second.
She'd avoided direct hits, but already her shield was down to half its full strength. Now it was
her turn, though. That flashy silhouette made for such a pretty target, and she'd never miss the chance to add some flair of her own to the performance.
Right as he burst open and unleashed his flames, an answering fireball soared up from beneath. It detonated just beneath him, the edge of the blast licking at his cloak before he disappeared, his quartet of projectiles consumed all at once before they could spread out. The remnants of the clashing attacks rained down across the battlefield as a hail of sparks, a thousand stars in the dark.
Blue and crimson eyes alike hunted one another through the chaos, but Grimm was tall and distinctive, the Witch small and crouched low with knees bent. She fired first this time, following her last fire attack with another just as fierce, then darted preemptively to one side before he could charge her way again.
As the Grimmkin oohed and aahed over the rain of embers, Grimm searched for the Witch in vain. He tasted her fury before he saw her elusive form, and the blazing bolt that struck him brought him below a treacherous threshold. In an instant his body burst apart into a swarm of black batlike insects that fluttered about in a mad panic. Most of them acted as little more than living shadows, but one glowed from within with a distinctive—and familiar—scarlet luster. These frenetic constituent bugs darted wildly this way and that, but they seemed incapable of attack; if her aim was true, the Witch could sling a couple spells before the swarm reassembled.
The Witch in question, though mildly baffled by the bug-devil’s latest trick, had been waiting for just such an opportunity to cut loose. Her wand swayed like a conductor’s baton, and sent half-visible bolts humming through the air one after another, enough that a few were bound to hit their mark. Ruined bats toppled one after another, before the sorceress abruptly ended her solo with a final fiery shot straight at their bright-lit leader. Another detonation shook the field, and a half-dozen charred sets of wings simultaneously fell to earth in its wake.
“I like you better this way!”She didn’t dare press her offense any further with her mana pool partially drained, but it hardly mattered. Within this brief respite she’d earned, her energy shield had stopped taking damage and started rapidly repairing itself, such that by the time Grimm showed his mask of a face again it'd already be close to full strength. Sweat dripped down her forehead and glistened in her dark hair, but her eyes now held in them a fresh confidence, a certainty that she could win in a battle of attrition. So intent was her focus upon the fight itself that she barely noticed the new figures joining the audience, each silhouette distinct from those surrounding it.
The swarm coalesced then into a ball of writhing wings, and Grimm emerged once more from within. His overall vitality lay just above the halfway point, but his bone-white features betrayed no sign of pain nor worry. He threw open his cloak to bring forth another salvo of firebats…
The Witch took a guard position, her wand held aloft…
…and the twilight tango continued.
Total word count: 2006
Grimm exp: 6/10 -> 9/10
Witch exp: 7/10 -> 10/10 (Lv up!)
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