Cue the heavy metal, the bass thump of drums and the frantic shredding of a guitar—even a very creative chorus clamoring for BLOOD! Who was Draconua to deny it, even as the... thing before her looked moments away from melting into a puddle of Oil then and there.

She didn't spend long contemplating whether or not it was a ruse—his... trying to climb into her mouth? Go in for an attack?—before rearing out of proximity and back in with snapping jaws. Another attempt at dropping the guillotine.

ROUND 2/?

100%

ATTEMPT: Grab Alrik like a snack (... 2!)
DEFENSE: None
INJURIES: None

@Alrik

"C'MON DRACONUA! SQUISH THAT PUNY WIMP!", Vedette squealed, flapping her tawny wings as she picked up a corndog and prepared to hurl it.

She launched it as hard as she could into the arena towards the tiny cat, ketchup and mustard flying off the spinning snack as it whirled through the air. It was honestly like art, red and yellow spiraling around a spinning blob of brown.

"DEVOUR IT, SLEEPLESS CHAOS!", she cried, hanging onto the edge of her seat as she gazed upon what was truly the most wonderful being in the caves.

Well, aside from Dhracia, but she might honestly kiss Drac's feet too if given the chance.

Pollen spent some time cooling down from her previous fight, damp with buds of new plants growing over singed fur. She needed to regrow her bodily garden, after all- with Khavur snapping one whip, she had to fix that, and Draconua's entrance...

Well, she stuck by Aethril after recovering, anyways. She had thought to try and use magic- but, with her tired healing, it slipped out of her grasp easily. Well, she'd work on it slowly, she had time. Wrapping the damp cloth she'd grabbed earlier tighter around her shoulders, she stood in the stands as she watched the battle, digits tensed on the soft surface. What if she faced Draconua next? Would the beast use magic? And what about that cat?

Pollen winced. Alrik was going against a powerhouse. But, for now, Pollen stepped away to gather popcorn of her own to gnaw on. Not throw, no, she wouldn't waste food! Besides, she wanted to stay calm for next match, anyways, even as she simmered with excitement.

Aethril must be so proud of her.

As kind and unkind, helpful and unhelpful as the audience members were and tried to be... Alrik's fate had been sealed a long time ago. Longer, perhaps, than some of them had even been alive. How cruel it must have been to grow up knowing you were destined for something and then finally, when the time came, to wake up for something and find out it was this?

Truly a battle of fates!

And I could go on, but our time is... up!

...Wait what? What is he doing?! TRYING?!?!?! Oh dear. Look! That little beast, that dumpling-shaped guy, attempting to scramble up Draconua's mouth before the snap-clammer of the guillotine!

Assuredly, he does not make it completely. His swishing tail is certainly put in peril, but... he does make it. And now he's on her snoot.

What was the point of that?

If anything, this was yet another case of evidence for why he never should have tried... now he was certain to go down in some harsh, horrible way... with a fight.

ROUND 2/?

100%

ATTEMPT: climb up the Snout
DEFENSE: no <3
INJURIES: no <3

Paws scrabbled against the chipped and worn smooth of her mask, a weight—however incomparable it was to herself—rocking against it. The fuzzball's tail swept in front of her nostrils, the hairs long enough to prick against nostrils and eyeballs alike. Draconua squinted, inhaling sharply to suppress a sneeze.

And to overcompensate, the Valkhound threw her head downward with a roar, shifting her weight backwards. A hand reached up, claws scraping against blood-red keratin(? Bone?) to find Alrik. If a few more chips and scrapes were added to the mix, then so be it—

—because she was going to get this foolish cat off of her face and devour him.

ROUND 3/?

100%

ATTEMPT: Grab Alrik (but with a hand this time)
DEFENSE: None
INJURIES: None

@Alrik

Fates and destiny, as we should all know by now, do not let up easily... if at all. If they exist, if anyone had the misfortune of being bound by such things, then they shall find that with every struggle the knots get tighter. If Alrik hadn't struggled, he would have been less of a pill to swallow. Would've saved the audience some heartbreak at least.

If hearts could break to the tune of clown music.

Bones sure could, but Alrik wasn't hearing any. Grasped, but not squozen... what did she plan to do then, eat him alive? At last, Alrik finally managed to meet acceptance. It's an important concept to meet right before death. I mean, now that Alrik had once last chance to think about it, his whole life seemed to be one big five stages of grief event. He'd done the denial, the anger, the bargaining-- boy howdy how he'd done the depression. This was the last stop. At least it would be a cool way to die, instead of something fully anticlimactic or traumatic like Alrik had expected. Now he was... just a little less insignificant!

Honk-a honk-a honk-a!

"Okay." His face was grim, sorrowful as ever. "Just don't bring me back." He sought out eyes. Did this thing have any? Probably not. Eyes were connected to a soul, or a heart, or some semblance of humanity. Eyes were given to things that live. Why does that matter now? Well, if this creature didn't have any, it meant she wasn't alive. She was just as heartless and cruel as the batcats. She was the blood of a savage.

"Go ahead." He bowed his head, and abdicated.

@Draconua

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

strong language

Between a cat and Draconua, Aethril didn't feel any particular need to cheer for one or the other; she liked Draconua, and her aloofness, and Alrik was a cat. Her eye was half on Pollen as she attempted to recover from her last fight-- right up until Alrik was in the monster's jaws.

'Go ahead,' said Alrik.

Aethril was on her feet at once.

"BOOOOO!" The Valkhand shrieked. "FIGHT BACK YOU FUCKING CUNT!! DON'T BE SUCH A QUIVERING PUSSY!!"

What had it signed up for, if it was going to tap out as soon as Draconua looked at it funny, after all? This wasn't the spirit of Deathmatch at all-- let Draconua fight something that was actually going to try to beat the shit out of her!

"BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!"

strong language

Were those... swear words?

Her head turned slowly and she stared at Aethril in awe, her eyes glittering. Sure she'd heard a few people say 'fuck' before, but not such colorful language as what was coming out of the Hand's painted lips. It was glorious.

"DON'T BE A FUCKING COWARD! IF YOU'RE REALLY A CAT YOU'LL GOUGE THAT BEAUTIFUL BITCH'S EYES OUT!! C'MON YOU REGUGITATED SHIT-SQUIRT! FIGHT!", she roared, digging her claws into the railing, "But then again if you are really so weak then- CRUNCH 'EM DRAC! FUCKING EAT 'EM AND SHIT 'EM OUT BAHAHAHA!!!"

Oh, this was... tragic.

Bittersweet. Beautiful. The stuff horrible songs were made of--the kind nobody'd ever want to hear. She couldn't make out what the cat was saying--not from here, and certainly not over the throb of the ear-crushing music (what was that stuff?)--but she could see it speaking, earnest-eyed, nearly limp in the enormous monster's foreclaws.

Thalia didn't cheer, anymore. She leaned forward, instead: wide-eyed, sad-faced, to see how this would play out. She... didn't think it would end well. Not for any of them. It wasn't some hard-won victory that would make for an epic tale. It was cheap, and cheated the monster of her win. And it wasn't going to end well for the cat--that was for damn sure.

Unless-... but no; she didn't think the monster had those kinds of feelings in her.

But imagine if she did, the silent faun thought, wistfully. Imagine if she took him, and left, and sat to speak with him about why he acts this way... The monster, struggling to understand her prey. Ah, but the artist could imagine. The bard's heart in her wanted to picture a fast friendship formed in the heat of battle, a quieting of the beast, a bolstering of the victim.

But more likely? More likely, it would end up with a crush of bones, and a lifeless, bloodied body left limp on the arena floor.

If Draconua left even that.

Figuratively speaking, Alrik had stuffed his hands inside of the pockets of an oversized hoodie. Kept his head down shouldering through the crowd, barely casting a glance as his shoulder was checked by a passerby. Took his hands out for nothing but scanning a ticket at the terminal. Had resigned himself to a pitiful nothing as he shoved through the turnstiles. Watched as the conductor sped by on magnetic rails and the wonders of technology.

Perhaps he'd wondered how the world had changed so much from what he remembered—thunderstorms and homemade stinkbombs hurled into the open windows of passing cars—and morphed into the picture of bloody red, Chaotic sigils, and Oilstained teeth guttering through every ounce of air. Perhaps he'd wondered, and decided that he did not like what was new, what had left him behind.

The conductor had looked an awful lot like Draconua. The sliding-glass doors of the railcar looked an awful lot like the jagged points of a maw gaping white. The hissing steam of condensation meeting linear synchronous motors looked an awful lot like the motes of entropic fire from a dark beast's belly.

The Sleepless Chaos lingered on none of this, far beyond waxing poetic like the faun in the stands. Instead the void where eyes seemed like they should be met the dim gaze of something long-dead and awaiting the necrophage beetles' arrival. They caught it, and they held fast. A sorrowful note filled the pitiful lump gripped in her claw; he made his plea as he stepped into the cabin.

It was not for survival.

It was for mercy.

Of course, too, it could be viewed as surrender. Restitution. A bid to be the reward well-earned. Draconua would not discriminate. The crowd rallied for blood, and she would deliver it for no one but herself. Herself, the harbinger only of death—merciful or not.

All things turn to Oil in the end.

"Avu kgwsd bgv kegwtce ofqahsj geiglgucs," she growled, in a thoughtless facsimile of a language spoken by no other creature but those old enough to remember it. Her voice was twisted into a guttural snarl, a completely different accent—and even dialect tracing her words. "Uuijwnpnu, lgyrwtnl lwlvse pwczt. Hzg yegl qm ycm yplz xqslco avu wf vpms." Draconua tilted her head, as if contemplating through her growling words.

Then, abruptly, as if she'd been speaking normally all along, she uttered with a lopsided, crooked smile: "your worth ends with this."

In the moment the valkhound tossed the cat high into the air, there was no humanity. No humanity as the pit of death yawned wide beneath his form as he surely reached the peak of his motion and gravity no longer was the weakest force upon him. No humanity as the grinning nightmare reared up onto her hind legs, springing to meet Alrik with the guillotine-snap! of jaws and thumping back to earth.

By all definitions laid out by the sad jester, Draconua was not alive.

@Alrik