bad ideer - Printable Version

It cannot let a good, easy thing be. Not anymore.

It disregarded everything that wasn't its target. Leveraging the brief stun, it lunged again to try and tear into the cow's neck, as it'd done to the calf before - it was little more than a puddle now. The Oil kicked up with the dust, splattering across D'valinn's hind legs.

The herd whirled around it, threatening to reduce the Valkhound to a meaty pulp. It offered no defense to the onslaught, hoping to take down the cow before it was fatally wounded. It would have to be very, very lucky.

Teeth met flesh, and blood flowed. And here came the trampling.

It was awkward, the Valkhound too close to one of their own for any of them to outright STEP on it. Instead it was a bruising churn, like being put through a washing machine, even though Eleven would have no idea what that meant. But the massive impact of shoulders, of tossing antlers, of one-ton-bodies, all surged around it.

That didn't change the fact that teeth had again met flesh, that the cow's furious bellow was laced with pain, that blood poured down through the thick, brown fur.

The storm closed in, and all D'valinn could hear was the force of seventeen sets of hooves hitting the ground around them, a flurry of blows beginning to glance past its flank. Its quills were there to deter direct attack, and could do little to stop the glancing shoves and jabs, peppering the side of its ribcage and shoulder with growing bruising.

But nothing had broken, yet. And that meant the game wasn't over.

Continuing to disregard the herds anger (until it damaged it severely), D'valinn sought to tear into the cow's open neck, to tear through the meat to whatever would make it cease.

There was no avoiding the fact that there'd be damage done; luck aside, the herd was large, angry, and in a crush around V-Chaos-Eleven. Whatever had driven them to risk it all up until this point, the "reward" of finding out was now occurring, with hooves slamming for its body, antlers raking for its ribs.

The cow was having a worse time of it, regardless. She was healthy, in her prime, and didn't go down easily. But she was bloodied, braying. She was still fighting, though, bodying toward Eleven and ducking her head, trying to give the Valkhound her long, pointed horn and her jagged antlers to chew on, or maybe to impale a biting face with.

The only factor luck now held was in who might go down first. For now, Eleven's held, the horn's swipes a jagged scrape and not an impaling, the antlers missing their mark, the cow stumbling and landing on her knees. But around her, the herd boxed in, and their attacks were far less likely to miss. From every side, they jabbed at Eleven, intending to simply kill it.

D'valinn was intimately familiar with damage.

It was accustomed to the sharp, shrieking pain of seared nerve endings. This was almost a pleasant reprieve, the shredded tissue tugging gently at its mind rather than consuming it entirely. It could ignore it a little longer, as long as the blood kept spilling on its tongue.

Though they were evenly matched in terms of size (something that I only now realised, jeepers), there were layers upon layers of fur and fat and muscle to tear through before hitting anything the Valkhound actually wanted to. All the while, the herd was storming around them.

In the space the cow had managed to create between them, the other 17 deer found an opening. A hoof slammed down into one of its back feet, another kicked sharply at the calf of the other hind leg. Its target's own hooves carved a clean, orange line in its right brow.

They were numerous but not soldiers. Not trained. Their mass was a stampede, stomping, goring, hitting one another almost as much as they struck the creature that thought itself named.

Had it earned that name?

Was it just pedantry, an ironically orderly bureaucracy, that drove Master Vargas to demand that his Forge earn a name? Or was it a proof that they were more than animals, more than these bulls, cows, these hairy, mindless beasts that surged around it-

They smelled, by the way. Their body odor was rank, like cow shit and sweaty hair, now churned up around Eleven in a cloud. Maybe that was almost worse than the pain. It filled the nostrils, promising a most ignoble death. To fall to an enemy? Forgiveable. To fall beneath the hooves and tines of these wretched beasts? Even their chrysalis would hold that stench.

Was there even still time to avoid it? No matter. V-Chaos-Eleven's reasons were its own. And the Meadow Deer didn't care.

No matter how big it was, seventeen deer was a lot of fuckin' deer. Not to mention, each one was equipped with at least three natural weapons that could kill it one, good hit. And there chances of landing that hit were increasing rapidly.

It was knocked down with a shove. A hoof caught its thigh, leaving a bloody bruise, the meat tenderised but the bone unbroken. A second hoof crushed down on one its ears, drawing a sharp hiss-yelp as the skin was pressed flat.

More flesh wounds. if it stayed down a little longer it'd get real ones.

It scrabbled at the undersides of the passing beasts, but was unable to find any purchase on any of the deer, instead dragging itself to and fro as the onslaught continued. A hoof made contact with its head, knocking all the thoughts out and replacing it with flashing lights and ringing ears. The world moved slower. The edges blurred.

A grazing blow knocked a tooth from the gum. A forepaw disappeared underneath a hoof with a crunch. Now that had been bone.

The last thing V-Chaos-Eleven--or 'the Valkhound,' D'valinn, etcetera--would likely see were the eyes of the cow it had torn into. She was furious. Her one good eye reflected that, rolling in rage even now, grief, and there was no self-preservation left there. She was trying in her last moments to fall upon D'valinn, to crush it, to gore it, to rip out its filthy insides. To leave the guts of the calf-killer strewn upon the grass.

The other eye reflected the light above, glinting and gleaming and blind: a Moissanite, one that could not roll and rage but still seemed filled with anger.

She went down, toward Chaos-Eleven, horn-first. She strove for the heart. She buried for the ribs and tore upward. She fell, and tumbled loosely to one side, and left a sheet of blood behind her.

She was trampled by the herd in their own rage, their own desire to crumble the Valkhound under-hoof to dust.

Crunch. Crack. Squelch. Dozens more blows rained down on them, reducing the miserable, over-ambitious Valkhound beneath into a black-orange splatter in the mud and cow shit. D'valinn was drifting further from that pitiable creature, enveloped in a growing, feverish warm-cold that painted its surroundings in shades of grey.

That fiery will that had driven it to keep going, to push further than it knew it could go, was fading. The odds were not in its favour. It wasn't getting out of this, not without chrysalis. There was an odd taste in its mouth, coming from somewhere underneath its tongue. The Oilstone was hungry.

The fog broke for a moment, framing the two - predator and prey - in a clarity that grazed spiritual. The fight was not over, they had seconds left to settle it in a final, brutal act of violence. And yes, it would be personal. Everything Eleven sunk its teeth into was doomed so some impassioned act of joint-suicide, it seemed.

D'valinn rolled, pain silenced by the last shock of adrenaline. The cow's horns met nothing but mud - but she began to roll too, falling onto her side. It crawled a little further before its back half was ruthlessly crushed under her dying bulk, pinning it to the ground and sending jolts down its ruined spine, nerves severed.

The chrysalis took one, leaving the other to melt into a foul slurry alongside her calf. But in the moments before that happened, they were the same animal, dying slowly in a puddle of their own shit, churned up and broken by the same hooves and horns.

V-Chaos-Eleven had forgotten what it was,

But it remembered now.

The herd milled. It didn't hasten to depart, this time. Instead, their outraged bellows, their stomps, their snorts, left the air ringing and muddy with dust and hot breath.

They kicked at the chrysalis. They struggled to crack it, to destroy it, but they couldn't break it, and they didn't understand what it was: they were only filled with fury. It took hours for them to leave, the vast circle around the gemstone now churned and saturated with blood and Oil. The gemstone was... somewhere in that mess, as were littered bones.

When V-Chaos-Eleven woke, it would be with a body not fully healed. Those parts around their torso that had been gouged and crushed had reformed... differently: a pure white, wide, jagged band around their midsection, near the hips, fully or nearly fully running the circumference of their body. But by then, at least, the herd would be long gone.

V-Chaos-Eleven suffers the following chrysalis consequence:

Glitch - Pigment may disappear from areas of the Gembound. This consequence cannot be healed via future chrysalis. In this case, the missing pigment covers much of their torso, focused around the waist, as a Moderate consequence.