His breathing calmed. The beating of his heart, the pulse of which he hadn't even realized was powerful enough to bounce the (thanks to Vesta) many pebbles near his feet, began to slow. His heightened awareness of the world, as he beheld it, began to scale back to normalcy.
And as Duncan came down from his battle-high... he very suddenly realized he was covered head-to-toe in rabbit guts.
"Aw, for fu-..." The bald man growled but didn't finish, grabbing a rag from his pocket to wipe the filth off his face.
The minute he'd realized that, if he put a little effort into it, he could actually blow away and immobilize the little bastards with a swing of his club, he'd taken to doing just that; Swinging like a madman at the little shits like the most demented game of whack-a-mole ever conceived. The ones he'd missed got knocked in the air and became easy pickings for Atisha's trident or became rock-sponges for their resident Earthshaker. The one's he'd actually
hit, however... well...
A club is not exactly a
clean weapon. Even less so when wielded by a man who can swing it hard enough to kick up a gale-force wind.
By the time he'd finished wiping his face off, Atisha was already gone. Though he did have to give the Elf credit (and she would never hear a damned word of it and it
pained him to even
think it) for actually sticking with him and
working with him through the fight, even if they hadn't spoken once the entire goddamn time. The Orc, on the other hand... maybe it was a difference in training between knight and soldier,
maybe it was the mother-hen reflex that had grown through his war years after seeing a few people he knew get shot in the face on a few occasions that he kept extraordinarily well-hidden or
maybe it was because he'd very suddenly left one of their flanks potentially exposed without much in the way of warning, but watching Mally run off on his own to hack down rabbits left and right
annoyed the ever-loving piss out of him.
He swallowed and buried that feeling though, as he headed back toward the others; this wasn't Afghanistan, no matter how much he (in retrospect,
hilariously) wished it was, the rules of the game here were different... And besides, the Canadian Army didn't exactly have a course on Murder-Rabbit Slaying, so he was still very much the amateur here.
Reaching the main group and catching the last bits of Aleph being... Aleph, Duncan just rolled his eyes slightly at the young man's same old self-promoting hero-speech he'd heard too many times this week and followed after them, subtly avoiding looking at the white-haired Geomancer as he passed for more than a few reasons-
A) The minute he saw her and realized she was actually
real, it made a series of events he'd been subconsciously trying to deny happened uncomfortably, undeniably true.
B) As far as most of the party knew, he was just some two-bit hooligan recruited out of a bar on the whim of a Royal Knight and he was so far down the totem-pole here he shouldn't even be talking to her anyway. An excuse that suited him fine as he'd also rather limit the possibility of pissing her off and getting beaten to death with the side of a mountain on this little misadventure.
C) The one time he
did actually try and get a good look at her, Avery caught him. And wouldn't shut up about it.
For three days. Instead, he busied himself with giving Aleph a light rap on the shoulder with his gore-covered fist as he passed him on the road.
"Dammit, Al, can we go five minutes without you pissing someone off?" He half-questioned, half-growled, in his usual gruff way... though if you tilted your head and squinted you could
almost see something that looked like a smirk on his face.
Call him crazy, maybe the idiot was starting to grow on him.
...Like a tumour perhaps, but still, it was progress.
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Skyguard
Alfhedil
BurningCold
Crimson Flame
Dezuel
PrinceAlexus
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