#pg 24

• GOOD DEFENSE OR BETTER OFFENSE?

Tagging @sea-wolf-coast-to-coast up here! -----------------------------------------------------------------

The arena sands shift under the roegadyn's weight as she staggers away from her opponent. A couple of wide swings of her blade help her keep the space she's just bought as the fought to recover her breath from the blow he'd just driven into her stomach. The weapon itself was working without aim, the day's battering of her helm and the summer heat of Thanalan had more or less left her blind in the one eye she had to work with. Few things in the world held her hate more fully than the hunk of metal wrapped around her head at that point, and the broken pieces that had it stuck in place. It wouldn't be long at this point until the xaela figured out she couldn't actually see and finished this off at this rate. C'arha's rules be damned, she wasn't about to lose a finals match over a piece of armor being useless.

A bloodied gauntlet grips down on her helm while a few one-handed swings continue to discourage her opponents advance. With a sharp cry of frustration built over moons of dealing with the thing, the sea wolf violently rips the helm from her head, tearing everything holding it in place along with it. Sweat-matted hair frames her half metal visage, looking every bit like it's fueled by flames as intense as those that'd left the angry red burn scars all around that plate. Every ounce of hate she had for Ishgard, that helm, and every other annoyance in life were grasp and twisted right into the direction of the eager man in front of her. There was still a blurry quality to her vision from sweat and head injuries, but she had a clear enough view to start the thundering footfalls of plated boots across the arena floor, the percussion to the war cry ripping hoarsely out of her throat.

Though her target scrambles backwards to get away from her, he barely gets a few footfalls before she's launched herself the last bit of the distance, impacting sword-first into his shoulder before the rest of her several-hundred ponze of flesh and armor comes crashing into him immediately after. The two of them drag a channel through the sand before she's driven her blade deep enough out the back of his shoulder to pin the man to the arena floor under her, already gripped with panic. If there's one thing the giant's learned in her time at the 'Grounds though, it's that a fight isn't finished until it's called. Her fingers tighten around the loathsome helm still hanging from her other hand, rage still boiling over as she stares down at the man under her. A wordless snarl leaps from her lips as she brings the helm crashing down onto his head, bashing into his face and scraping along the forward points of his horns with a horribly pitched scrape along the steel.

Over and over again the scrap of armor-turned-weapon crashes into the xalea's face, repeating that harsh pitch of horn dragging against metal in a slightly uneven pattern. Though he was capable of doing little more than kicking at the sand to try and escape, no call had come. The fight wasn't over yet. So the battery and sounds rolled on with each arc of her arm. Even as the world was rapidly fading into unclear, fuzzy blurs...

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The conscious part of Brem's mind started a lazy slog out of the murk it'd fallen into, still too coated in the slime of that place to make sense of the world whipping around her at a pace too hard to properly get a hold of. Her eye peeks open, and is immediately rewarded with a blade of light stabbing right through the orb and to the very back of her skull, sending her back to the darkness for another moment longer. A few additional blinks eventually gets enough adjustment to let her look at the fuzzy shapes around her. Most were familiar, even if they weren't clear. Safe enough not to feel panicked as she stumbled back into the realm of the waking. The first that came into any sort of clarity was the rough features of a purple xaela man with pale hair. He was making sounds, she didn't know what they were but his tone was soothing and that was nice. A smile pulls it's way onto her lips as he continued to make nonsense fall from his mouth at her.

Other sounds past him start to stand out. These too were familiar ones, though the shapes were too far away to place them. They were not soothing sounds, however. Some of them were frightful sounds, anxious sounds, even angry ones. They were near her, but they didn't seem to be pressing down her way. Perhaps the purple man's sounds were keeping them from closing in. A part of her knew that all of this was wrong. Things aren't supposed to be the way they are at the moment, but her mind hasn't put itself back together fully enough to understand how to be worried about that.