6th of Frost, 120
In Kai's 'throne room', Arkash stood. Around him was a field of broken bodies; bodies that he'd cut down just moments prior. The blood of his foes covered a shallow puddle around his toe-claws and dripped liberally from his form. He'd done a lot of dashing, rolling, and weaving to evade the strikes of his targets. And all that moving and mobility saw him tumble through the gore he'd spilled. He didn't mind the smell or the clammy warmth, but his open wounds stung a little at the contact. They burned, in fact. The sensation was more uncomfortable than it was debilitating, but it remained present in the back of his mind all the same.
Before him was one of the men he'd cut down, but not fully. Arkash had cut out the tendons in the human's knees to disable them while he dealt with the man's friends. At that moment, it was just the two of them; the last remaining heartbeats in the room. The human rested on his knees, delirious from the blood loss. He swayed to and fro while Arkash stood behind him, the man didn't seem to realize where he was or what was happening.
The Rathor tilted his head a little at the display. Was that how pitiful he'd looked when Malafor had forced him to open his wrists? The idea made his claws shake, so he steadied one set by taking the man's head by his hair in a balled fist. Arkash drew a deep breath while he steadied both himself and the man before lifting his dagger to the man's throat. Arkash was going to leech directly from the man's arteries to restore some of his energy for the fight to come. Kai, the leader of all the men he'd killed, lived on somewhere in the dark of the underground lair. Arkash was to challenge the Jindai and put an end to him once and for all.
The Sawtoothed Renegades were a gang in Lower Nivenhain, a gang Arkash had joined out of desperation when the Black Boar Chargers came for him. He'd used them for protection and shelter once, but they used him in turn. Arkash was their hitter and was made to extort and kill a number of innocent people under their command. He'd been fine with it at the time, as Arkash had learned to hate the bulk of humanity. But, times changed. Though he still felt a strong disconnect between himself and the humans, he actively tried not to hate them. They were a symptom, not the disease. The Renegades were a poor influence, and were, in essence, a reflection of the darkness in the hearts of humans. Their goal was the selfish prosperity of their members, powered by extortion and drug peddling. For that, they needed to die.
So, with his dagger placed firmly to the man's neck, he slowly split the skin and leeched the proceeding flow. There, he found a bounty of blight. It was... almost overwhelming. From the neck of a lone, gurgling human, Arkash stole an unexpected sum of power from the man's life force, and swayed the blood to coat his arms and claws in a gauntlet-like fashion with sharpened tips. Even after casting those two spells, he still carried with him an unreasonable amount of blight. It seemed that by sacrificing others, Arkash could temporarily bolster his power two-fold.
The rathor gasped as the surge of energy took his form, then rolled his shoulders in a shudder. When the man he had subdued passed, the power in the human's veins passed in tandem; Arkash had taken all he could from the bag of meat. So, rath simply pushed and let go of the man's hair, which dropped his lifeless form to the floor while his gathered blight swirled around his forearms. The plate armor he'd crafted around his extremities weighed him down, though only with an eighth of the weight it would have been if he'd used steel in place of blood. Their hardness and weight would allow him sufficient protection and support in the fight ahead.
Kai had to have known something was amiss, what with the gunshots and the screams. It wouldn't be a simple assassination, like he'd otherwise grown accustomed to. So, Arkash looked to the doorway that preceded the stairs, and lifted both his gauntlet-covered claws. With his blight, he cast sway on the blood that pooled around his toes, and clenched his claws as he willed it to move. Sharpened spikes of blood slowly rose from the ground and stuck the wooden frame in all directions to form a sort of cage in the doorway. No one would be able to escape with that obstacle in place, he believed.
A sigh escaped him as he lowered his armor-clad claws, and inspected the blight he had remaining. Just a sliver; most of it had been expended on the formation and suffusing of the spikes. The fight with Kai would come down to a test of skill alone, no magic or anything of the sort. With a sigh, Arkash collected his shortsword and dagger, and tested the grip of his gauntlets. It was clunky, clumsy, but the extra defense was worth it. After steeling himself, he proceeded into one of the halls and held his blades at his sides. He was ready.
Another two goons fell victim to Arkash's blood-shaped blades by the time he arrived at the door of Kai's chamber. The burn in his wounds hadn't eased much, but all his focus remained on the task at hand regardless. After drawing a deep breath, Arkash lifted his foot claws to the door and booted the surface hard. The door swung open, already unlocked. The moment his eyes adjusted, he found the barrel of a gun aimed at him from across the room. In no time at all, Arkash dove forward and rolled to the side take evasive action.
As an accomplished marksman, Arkash knew what sorts of movements were hard to keep up with. As he'd hoped, the blast of the gun missed and a spray of wooden splinters erupted somewhere behind him. It was the cool-down period for the gun, and Kai was defenseless. Arkash rolled to his feet with both his blades extended at his sides, then burst from the floorboards with his body lowered. He was like a tensed coil, unfurling with explosive force.
With his eyes locked on the rath, Kai dropped his gun and drew his own blade, sized appropriately for a Jindai. Arkash widened his eyes at the sight of the weapon; his gauntlets wouldn't be enough to stop a strike from that thing. The room began to grow hotter as Arkash dipped and wove aside to avoid the strike of the enormous, two-handed sword, then rolled to appear on the Jindai's flank. He couldn't have anticipated what came next, but Arkash was light on his feet, dexterous and quick in his reflexes. The Jindai's veins began to glow, as if there was fire in them at the moment Arkash leapt with deadly intent. Just a second before the collision, Kai turned and loosed a plume of flame from his jaws. The rath had no time to react, and couldn't control his momentum or trajectory. His reflexes helped little in such a situation, but he managed to lift his arms and shut his eyes to shield himself.
The torrent of flame struck him and scorched the leathers he wore along with the scales beneath. Arkash hissed, then cried out in pain as he landed blade-first in the torso of the Jindai, and ran him through completely. There Arkash clung, alight with flame. The fire breath stopped, but not in time to spare Arkash's arms, chest, and scalp. Burning, he dug his foot claws into the Jindai's gut, and began to repeatedly drive his dagger into the man's chest while he struggled with the burning sting that enveloped his body. As Kai stumbled backward with his lungs punctured seven-or-so times, Arkash reached up and swung with a broad lash, and opened the Jindai's jugular.
A stream of thick red ran down, and Arkash ducked beneath it. He'd purposefully avoided stabbing the man's heart so he could use the spill to his advantage. As the red fell on him, the flames that engulfed his form were extinguished gradually, or at least until the giant fell with a thud, and clasped his bleeding throat. At once, Arkash fell to the floor and began to smear the blood all over himself with the gauntlets. Where he could, he rolled to try and extinguish the flames, and his efforts were rewarded with the relief of a cool, burning sting in wake of the fires.
He laid there panting, breathing heavily while he collected his senses and wit, then peered to the Jindai while the man gurgled and sputtered from the gash in his throat. Burned and bloody, Arkash began to stand and hissed at the terrible pain that ran through his form. Burned, open wounds showed through the gaps in his ruined leathers, but they'd been quenched with the blood of a different species entirely. As Arkash approached the Jindai, the man breathed his last and expired. From there, the lizard gripped the handles of his weapons while they laid embedded in the Jindai's chest, twisted, then pulled them free with a rolling hiss of pain. His body shook at the intensity of the burns, and tears welled in his bloody eyes, but he was victorious; he was alive.
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