The battle outside the warehouse raged on as Islet’s wishes within were twisted. Rian and Nessa tangled out back with one of the fresh ghouls with gusto and enthusiasm, in spite of how messily or hare-brained their would-be proctors might find them if they weren’t busy themselves.
The newly turned Ghoul by the track entrance to the warehouse didn’t have enough presence of mind to pause following the compulsion to try to get inside in order to fend off Nessa’s macabre grapple attempt. Unperturbed by the lack of hygiene—on account of being dead—and under flaring orders more important than life itself, the Ghoul was tripped and faltered whilst trying to move forward.
The ghoul didn’t even react to Nessa’s screaming her plans out loud, and any pain it may have felt was lost in the torrent of torment it was already undergoing as its transformation finished. Nessa’s knives connected and released a slurry of half-coagulated blood as they sliced through undead flesh before finding purchase on bone.
Thankfully, Rian’s sense in not blasting Nessa away in friendly fire and opting to instead encourage the other prospect to make some distance before blowing the ghouls legs off prevented the reasonable trucker-turned-gangster hopeful from owing the more volatile firecracker prospect and the rest of the pack a round of drinks.
Unless you were shooting at Leo or Ragenard—and usually at their own suggestion—accidental friendly fire with some sort of decent excuse—like being in the middle of a ghoul attack—meant the next round was on you.
It was only fair, and Edduard—the once Iron Jackal enforcer whose soul was done being scoured even as his knees disintegrated under a buckshot laden shockwave—would have loved if the IJ’s would have had such a good-natured policy. He laid there for a moment as the prospects set off, hating them. He found it strange that it felt good, having considered himself quite the apathetic man in life. But he didn’t move to give chase as the flesh on his legs came to life and crawled back to rejoin him. He felt the compulsion still, understood he had marching orders, and his continuing existence hadn’t been guaranteed.
He turned his hands to the concrete beneath the rolling steel door as he laid there and began to scratch. It didn’t hurt at all as the flesh gave way, revealing bone animated by sinews dripping with Ayman’s power. Even as his lower legs still pulled themselves tight in order to knit themselves back on, Edduard began to dig.
It turned out, Ghouls were really good at digging, and the concrete chipped, tore, and parted almost immediately, and the ground beneath might as well have been water to the creature Edduard had become.
The scant seconds that the prospects’ attention was on their moving elsewhere would be all it took for them to see the shoulder narrow hole and the ghouls body gone headfirst in with only a moment left for them to see the thing disappear from the calves on down as it slipped beneath the earth outside of the locked-up track door.
That is such bullshit, he only has one head…, Fernando mentally groused to no one in particular over the ghoul’s scryblast. Everyone besides Bardiche was too busy ignoring the frenetic bursts of sensory information being vomited by the newbies to pay him any mind. But he felt quite justified in his assessment.
Thanks to his three-fold increase on available sensory apparatus, the altered ghoul had no problem or need to slow down his run in order to clearly perceive the fuckery that was being arranged against him, at least as far as visual acuity was concerned.
All three of his brains boggled together as he witnessed what he was beginning to fear wasn’t a particularly egregious pair of examples in the arena of how little self-regard the Bloodstones had for their own safety...
No way dude could even see how close he came to—whazzat?
The tri-headed Ghouls charge slowed down the barest of fractions, as he tried and failed to make out what exactly Draaven had passed to Rhetta in the split second before…
Fernando’s commitment to his motion was too complete even despite his slight slowing down, and his attempts to reposition his spine whip weren’t fast enough to impale Rhetta. He’d seen her do something with her hands and caught a glint, but it wasn’t until she was suddenly in front of him and trying to unfurl her own trap—while heedless of his own momentum—that the wire became clear.
Her moves might have caused him actual harm if he hadn’t slowed down previously, but as it was, he was able to bleed off his momentum by simply going with the motion and pressing the spine whip taut against his head where the wire held it. Without his momentum to supplement, Rhetta’s tugging merely produced a cascade of bone dust to fall upon them as her struggle made the wire grind against the rough surface of Fernando’s boney exterior.
Finally, he had the slip of a woman right within range of—
The bottom fell from his non-existent stomach, and Fernando’s eye sockets thrummed as he cast his vision about madly in search of help. There was too much interference from the newbies on the scryblast, and he couldn’t catch Bardiche’s attention.
He couldn’t close his mind to the question in time, and it was too loaded with the unaddressed emotional detritus accumulated over a half life that already had gone more than twice the length his original run as a young man of 23 had.
“Isabella,” replied the undead monster, almost automatically. His hands weren’t fully lowered, but the creature was otherwise wide open for the moment, with the exception of holding the whip-like appendage against his head where the wire tangled them together.
“It’s—” Steven’s response was literally beaten short, as Snow unfurled his one-two combo. Outwardly, Steven’s skin around his sternum appeared unharmed as Snow’s first hit connected, but the young werewolf would be able to feel the pulverization of the bone’s beneath as the force of the blow transferred through the cut resistant skin and down on through the creature’s heft.
You could bend and defer the forces all you wanted (or could, to be more accurate), even sending them on through a trip through the outer spheres where reactions wouldn’t come due until everything else did as Lord Ayman himself knew but nothing dispelled the simple truth: physics was owed.
As he was not gifted with any abilities against momentum, Steven was utterly unable to do anything further except fall in accordance with the equal but opposite reaction that was imposed upon his body by the sheer force of Snow’s hit. A force that was summarily cancelled and replaced with that of Snow’s second strike, which sent the upward lurching Ghoul to crash down to the Earth with a vigorous smash that released a puff of grass and earthen debris around Snow.
“—actually my pleasure, no biggie,” Steven finished as he adroitly twisted upon the ground and jumped back up to his feet almost immediately. His head appeared dented as he smiled menacingly, but it visibly puffed itself back out with an audible pop as Steven turned his upward momentum into a spin intended to shift that force angularly onto the roundhouse kick the ghoul subsequently uncoiled towards Snow’s midsection, aiming to send the werewolf off his own footing.
Joey didn’t bother with trying to discuss with the others or even keep abreast of what was going on in the rest of the battlefield. More than the others, the wealth of experience he’d accrued over his centuries serving Ayman was something the serpentine ghoul valued itself, over the mere fact that they got to be.
He’d already been a warrior in life, a proud and disciplined soldier of an ancient Iverian house—a house that unbeknownst to him was nothing but a thralldom of a certain group of Iverian beings—and as such the centuries under Ayman had only given him more time to hone his battle instincts.
Instincts that had already once before met Broch’s kind, and who demanded a pair of narrowed eyes be firmly kept on the monster’s own glowing ones, waiting for the telltale hint…
Joey didn’t think, simply reacted. A mixture of instincts and physiology left it bracing for the impending—and significant—ouch that the shadow of the werebadger’s fists promised, but not before the snake monster reacted to Broch’s sudden dodge by desperately flinging its tail and lower section towards the shifter’s legs.
Joey wasn’t able to dodge Broch’s strike, and his vision of the world simple ceased as the force of the blow first concussed and then briefly disabled his metabody’s brain, but before it was stunned, it was rewarded with feeling it’s tail lightly curl around the werebadger’s feet.
Blind and briefly stunned, Joey nonetheless found the mobility necessary to give his tail a solid yank, of the sort that might slow down a follow up momentarily…and make a sudden wrenching jolt that would make holding on difficult for Broch’s passenger.
Edduard found himself pulled upwards almost immediately, and as Lark managed to step outside, so then did Edduard find itself inside the dimly lit interior of a hallway, right outside a storage room. He didn’t know why hell was like this, but he could hear screams, and they angered him. Before it could move to follow them upstairs however, a great phantom pain that it thought belonged to him overcame him…
Lark had just blown off the upper two thirds of Antoine’s head outside. The ghoul briefly hopped about as the remains of its mouth were unable to produce the same disorienting scream that the ghoul was providing its buddies over their connection as it experienced its first bout with catastrophic damage…that slowly began to knit itself back together.
Its macabre dance only lasted a few fractions of a second before Lark’s second blow dropped it to the ground, where it proceeded to roll in healing agony. Myriads of questing tendrils that found each other and began to knit together roiled visibly over the creature’s wounds.
The second ghoul ran on towards Lark, as if heedless or unwilling to stop or slow down despite the gruesome response it witnessed its buddy encounter.
Avatar Bardiche closed her monstrously unhinged jaw and smiled in ecstasy as she briefly felt her beloved Ayman’s presence surge through her into the world and then back again. She resumed a leisurely walk in the direction of the back of the warehouse, continuing to give Joey and Broch’s encounter a wide berth.