Post by Colton Deraine on Dec 17, 2019 22:28:27 GMT -5
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[attr="class","firstfriend"]
Bravery is believing in yourself, and that's one thing nobody can teach you.
He didn’t bring his new set of armor in for this fight.
Partially it was disrespect, yes, but it was also partially that he knew that there was a possibility that he’d come up against someone from Class Red in the Vytal Festival. Just because he didn’t think they were a threat individually did not mean that they couldn’t be threats in the future, especially if they knew his capabilities well enough to plan around them. The fact of the matter was that his opponent today wasn’t in the same league as the one he had beaten and given his all against the day before, so this entire match was just a formality. Everyone knew who the victor was going to be before the match started, and it was a sorry state of affairs that the Green Team finals would go down as the most competitive match of the entire tournament.
As the trainee walked onto the stone arena, his physical features and attire became clear for everyone to see. Short brown hair and intense brown eyes that topped up a more militaristic battle uniform than most. An iron cuirass adorned the boy’s torso, and his left arm was covered from the wrist to past the middle of his arm with a white metal vambrace that was his folded-up shield. His right arm was covered up in a similar manner with manica-style armor that covered the outer half of his arm with curved and overlapping segments of metal plates.
His hands and head were left uncovered, and his legs and feet were protected by what looked to be an unbroken line from the gray iron boots to greaves that went up to his mid-thigh. Beneath that were dark jeans to complete the ensemble of gray and white. His sword was already drawn and in his hand with his gray and blue scabbard attached to the sword belt on his hip. The sword itself was a longer backsword that had a blade roughly 89 centimeters long with a single potent cutting edge with noncutting ‘back’ of the blade being thickened up to provide extra strength. The shield on his arm, Omen, unfolded into a concave circular shield roughly 76 centimeters in diameter as the trainee undid the strap that kept its folded-up form attached to his arm as he took his starting position and activated his semblance to unfold the damned thing.
While the videos of each class were self-contained, it didn’t exactly take very long for rumor to spread on how each person got there. Aegle beat Kishka and Qiu’li, and Colton had beaten Argent and Rose. It was impressive, in the avoidance of natural selection sort of way. There were a lot of things that had to go perfectly right for Aegle to even be physically present here, let alone in the finals for the Exhibition Tournament. It was a nice little show that even those born without fully functioning bodies were able to go far and be at the top of their class even in martial ability.
That, and the complete damning of any assumption that any talent resided in Class Red. Having the cripple with heart problems beat out people like Qiu’li, Nik, and Kishka was fucking embarrassing. Kishka could have and should have won, but the second match against Qiu’li was even more baffling and inexcusable. It appeared partially that the braindead barbarian had finally learned fear and knew that if he went up against Colton, he would suffer a lot of pain. The way Kishka told it, though she was unreliable, it appeared that Aegle might have actually legitimately won the fight with the gorilla in perhaps the least inspiring manner possible. Colton himself liked that narrative, because it was the most pathetic.
Really, it seemed like the only thing she was capable of doing was punching. Zero ranged capability existed, and her speed was pretty pathetic on top of that so there was no risk of her actually closing any gap that existed at the beginning of a fight. In short, the only way that she could win is if someone either let her close the gap like Kishka or did it themselves like Qiu’li and they were additionally somehow worse in melee combat… than an unarmed cripple. Very inspiring, Haven Academy. Very inspiring. Equal parts luck in having enemies who played to Aegle’s only win condition and fortitude for making it this far in the first place. It worked out for the brunette, too, because as much as he disliked Qiu’li to win that match with one hundred percent certainty would probably take a while in playing around that transformation of his to ensure that he never got even a puncher’s chance at knocking him out of the arena.
With Aegle, there was no such concern. It was both an assured victory and a needed one, or else Haven would never get new recruits. The fact of the matter was that the image that Aegle would cut if she was the class representative would be pathetic. Seeing her up against Bel from Beacon Academy would just be sad, because the cripple would just be toyed with before being executed before she could do anything but be bounced around like a tennis ball ricocheting across the arena. There would be a chance for an actual death, frankly, because setting someone with heart problems up against the best of the best was just fucking stupid to begin with. An alternative explanation for her win over Qiu’li was that he was concerned over her health issues, but that would assume that the Neanderthal was capable of understandings things like ‘internal organ damage’… which he wasn’t.
Which meant that it was very likely that he not only lost, but lost fair and square. That meant that Aegle was truly probably the best fighter out of all of them, because Kishka had lost to Aegle with the usual excuses. The cripple who could only walk up and punch you was the strongest member of Class Red, which compromised of half of all first-year trainees. Had this been a fight with no stakes, he might have indulged the crowd a bit and been willing to go toe to toe in melee… but that’s what literally everyone before him did because they were one-dimensional as fuck and either didn’t think of or couldn’t do the completely obvious other option.
If your opponent has no ranged capability and low speed, why do you let them engage in melee with you in the first place? Granted, he wasn’t entirely sure how strong the girl was physically, but that point didn’t really matter as long as she was weaker than Polarity… which she was. The brunette didn’t have a reason to dislike Aegle specifically, so he’d make it as quick as possible. After all, the gap between them was so big that it wasn’t like drawing it out was desirable for Colton anyway in this instance. He had absolutely nothing to prove, and no reason whatsoever to want to make his enemy in this scenario suffer. The match would be quick and boring, with everyone going home feeling like they just wasted time.
The girl had apparently shown a surprising durability in her past matches, so the former champion didn’t feel the need to hold back at all if she could win in a slugfest against Qiu’li. If the other class was too fucking stupid to know what a ranged attack looked like, Colton was more than willing to do a live demonstration. The fact that simply not allowing an opponent to use their one method of attack had not occurred to anyone else in that entire class was disgusting and said a lot about the talent level over there. Class Green had several trainees who would beat Aegle any day of the week, but Class Red apparently had zero. Having more trainees didn’t mean anything if they were all shitters, frankly, and this match would prove it to anyone who still refused to believe that simple truth.
Argent would win this easily, and so would Rosalia. Colton needed to do better than either of them would do to justify his place here, and he was confident he could do that. Rose would fuck around and let the match run longer than it needed to, and Argent wasn’t cold blooded enough to actually start with everything he has out of some misguided sense of restraint. The goal here for the Argus native was ten seconds, with either an aura breakage or a ring out happening after that time. The only real risk, then, would be if he misjudged the distance and Aegle’s aura didn’t break if he tried to smash it, or if she managed to not be flung out of the ring if he went that route.
That would mean that Colton would have to walk over to finish the job, which would probably take about an extra minute. That wouldn’t be ideal, frankly, so hopefully it didn’t come to that. Colton’s posturing was aggressive, and he placed himself the closest he could be to his opponent, which meant that the maximum distance she could be away from him is twenty-five meters if she was at the back of her area or twenty if she was in the front. The area was only fifty square meters across, which meant a ring out was possible if he followed through the entire way out of his own semblance range. Yeah, that was probably best.
He wasn’t exactly personally invested in this matchup, so the best course of action was just to finish this as quickly as possible and to ensure that he never got hit. Aegle wasn’t very intimidating, but she also wasn’t braindead and likely had some sort of trick up her sleeve in the mold of Qiu’li desperately trying to stay relevant by googling random engineering projects on the internet to cook up. Why would Colton give her an opportunity to use whatever that plan was? Why would he allow the match to have even a one percent chance of his opponent winning and robbing him of the opportunity to represent his school and make good on that public relations opportunity to bring in more people? Why would he let his ego give Aegle of all people the opportunity to embarrass herself on national television?
He wouldn’t.
He wouldn’t engage with the ravings of an insane person and would instead sprint forward when the match started and rely entirely on his semblance for this one. His shield would go flying first in what was his usual opener, with the shield blocking line of sight from seeing the sword that was always flying behind it. What typically happened then was the redirection of the sword with the opportunity and the simultaneous attack of both, but the fact of the matter was that Aegle’s aura was probably strong enough to withstand that if she won a slugfest with Qiu’li.
Instead, the shield would go high and then unnaturally go low in not an attack, but a reposition without losing much momentum. What the goal was for the shield to get at least partially under the feet of his opponent so that he could blast upwards with Polarity to get the girl off-balance at worst and airborne at best in an unusual expenditure of aura for the former champion. The sword would come in, dust enhancement activated lighting the cutting edge bright rid with fire dust at chest level with full force forward aiming for the middle of Aegle’s torso and continuously blasting forward. It was an attack, yes, in the same manner a spear would be tossed, but unlike his usual style Colton wouldn’t actually pull the sword back. He would continue slamming forward with Polarity on the sword and trying to knock Aegle either off balance or in the air with his shield on the ground.
If she fell, great! The shield could catch the fall and he could just toss that outside the arena. The shield didn’t have its dust activated and frankly wouldn’t be no matter how this match went. The problem with the dust is that it didn’t do its full damage immediately, so unless he used it at the very beginning there was no point in using it if his goal was a speed run. He’d continue to move forward enough to continue to drive Polarity forward but had zero issues just pushing both of his weapons out of his range if it looked like Aegle could just be blasted off the arena immediately.
That was the entire point, after all. Anyone with any sort of manipulation over solid objects could have done literally the exact same thing, but they chose not to do it for some reason. While Aegle likely had brain damage to account for the derangement, she was still somehow one of the smarter ones in her class. If he had to guess, she probably ran her mouth to make Kishka actually go in close during their match. It wouldn’t be hard, considering she had separated Argent and Kishka during the draft. Qiu’li was dumb as a rock so he had no trouble believing that Aegle had come up with some sort of basic strategy to get rid of him that was honestly probably the more impressive of the two wins.
There was nothing she could actually say to Colton that would rile him up enough for him to completely throw away his uncontestable ranged advantage to come in and trade punches with the person who could only throw punches. Even if she did go digging around his files and the intranet for things to piss him off like she likely did with Kishka, it wouldn’t be anything except an act of desperation at this point. Nah, honestly, with the quality of strategy being displayed by Class Red and the complete lack of regard Aegle had for her own life Colton could almost guarantee he knew what the secret plan was.
It was a bomb that she’d detonate when she got close. That would explain the extra bulk that seemed to be present beneath the cripple’s clothing today and would fit in with the themes on display over there. If he was right, though, it’s not like he cared very much. If it detonated when she got rung out, she had aura to protect herself. If she decided to detonate it after her aura ran out after clawing her way back against Polarity somehow, that was just natural selection at work. Neither was really his problem, and that guess was really just a wild one thrown out there as something that was both dumb enough and self-destructive enough to fit the bill of ‘Plans Aegle might actually try in a high stakes match’. If she didn’t do it today, the brunette was positive she’d do it in the future at some point. Maybe even against Kishka, who would no doubt be amazed that someone could have so little regard for their personal safety and lose a second match against her due to that surprise.
Well, regardless, this was over. Colton was still sore from yesterday’s final and Aegle probably was too, so after this they could just get up and go home to recover from those slugfests rather than waste any more time here.
Partially it was disrespect, yes, but it was also partially that he knew that there was a possibility that he’d come up against someone from Class Red in the Vytal Festival. Just because he didn’t think they were a threat individually did not mean that they couldn’t be threats in the future, especially if they knew his capabilities well enough to plan around them. The fact of the matter was that his opponent today wasn’t in the same league as the one he had beaten and given his all against the day before, so this entire match was just a formality. Everyone knew who the victor was going to be before the match started, and it was a sorry state of affairs that the Green Team finals would go down as the most competitive match of the entire tournament.
As the trainee walked onto the stone arena, his physical features and attire became clear for everyone to see. Short brown hair and intense brown eyes that topped up a more militaristic battle uniform than most. An iron cuirass adorned the boy’s torso, and his left arm was covered from the wrist to past the middle of his arm with a white metal vambrace that was his folded-up shield. His right arm was covered up in a similar manner with manica-style armor that covered the outer half of his arm with curved and overlapping segments of metal plates.
His hands and head were left uncovered, and his legs and feet were protected by what looked to be an unbroken line from the gray iron boots to greaves that went up to his mid-thigh. Beneath that were dark jeans to complete the ensemble of gray and white. His sword was already drawn and in his hand with his gray and blue scabbard attached to the sword belt on his hip. The sword itself was a longer backsword that had a blade roughly 89 centimeters long with a single potent cutting edge with noncutting ‘back’ of the blade being thickened up to provide extra strength. The shield on his arm, Omen, unfolded into a concave circular shield roughly 76 centimeters in diameter as the trainee undid the strap that kept its folded-up form attached to his arm as he took his starting position and activated his semblance to unfold the damned thing.
While the videos of each class were self-contained, it didn’t exactly take very long for rumor to spread on how each person got there. Aegle beat Kishka and Qiu’li, and Colton had beaten Argent and Rose. It was impressive, in the avoidance of natural selection sort of way. There were a lot of things that had to go perfectly right for Aegle to even be physically present here, let alone in the finals for the Exhibition Tournament. It was a nice little show that even those born without fully functioning bodies were able to go far and be at the top of their class even in martial ability.
That, and the complete damning of any assumption that any talent resided in Class Red. Having the cripple with heart problems beat out people like Qiu’li, Nik, and Kishka was fucking embarrassing. Kishka could have and should have won, but the second match against Qiu’li was even more baffling and inexcusable. It appeared partially that the braindead barbarian had finally learned fear and knew that if he went up against Colton, he would suffer a lot of pain. The way Kishka told it, though she was unreliable, it appeared that Aegle might have actually legitimately won the fight with the gorilla in perhaps the least inspiring manner possible. Colton himself liked that narrative, because it was the most pathetic.
Really, it seemed like the only thing she was capable of doing was punching. Zero ranged capability existed, and her speed was pretty pathetic on top of that so there was no risk of her actually closing any gap that existed at the beginning of a fight. In short, the only way that she could win is if someone either let her close the gap like Kishka or did it themselves like Qiu’li and they were additionally somehow worse in melee combat… than an unarmed cripple. Very inspiring, Haven Academy. Very inspiring. Equal parts luck in having enemies who played to Aegle’s only win condition and fortitude for making it this far in the first place. It worked out for the brunette, too, because as much as he disliked Qiu’li to win that match with one hundred percent certainty would probably take a while in playing around that transformation of his to ensure that he never got even a puncher’s chance at knocking him out of the arena.
With Aegle, there was no such concern. It was both an assured victory and a needed one, or else Haven would never get new recruits. The fact of the matter was that the image that Aegle would cut if she was the class representative would be pathetic. Seeing her up against Bel from Beacon Academy would just be sad, because the cripple would just be toyed with before being executed before she could do anything but be bounced around like a tennis ball ricocheting across the arena. There would be a chance for an actual death, frankly, because setting someone with heart problems up against the best of the best was just fucking stupid to begin with. An alternative explanation for her win over Qiu’li was that he was concerned over her health issues, but that would assume that the Neanderthal was capable of understandings things like ‘internal organ damage’… which he wasn’t.
Which meant that it was very likely that he not only lost, but lost fair and square. That meant that Aegle was truly probably the best fighter out of all of them, because Kishka had lost to Aegle with the usual excuses. The cripple who could only walk up and punch you was the strongest member of Class Red, which compromised of half of all first-year trainees. Had this been a fight with no stakes, he might have indulged the crowd a bit and been willing to go toe to toe in melee… but that’s what literally everyone before him did because they were one-dimensional as fuck and either didn’t think of or couldn’t do the completely obvious other option.
If your opponent has no ranged capability and low speed, why do you let them engage in melee with you in the first place? Granted, he wasn’t entirely sure how strong the girl was physically, but that point didn’t really matter as long as she was weaker than Polarity… which she was. The brunette didn’t have a reason to dislike Aegle specifically, so he’d make it as quick as possible. After all, the gap between them was so big that it wasn’t like drawing it out was desirable for Colton anyway in this instance. He had absolutely nothing to prove, and no reason whatsoever to want to make his enemy in this scenario suffer. The match would be quick and boring, with everyone going home feeling like they just wasted time.
The girl had apparently shown a surprising durability in her past matches, so the former champion didn’t feel the need to hold back at all if she could win in a slugfest against Qiu’li. If the other class was too fucking stupid to know what a ranged attack looked like, Colton was more than willing to do a live demonstration. The fact that simply not allowing an opponent to use their one method of attack had not occurred to anyone else in that entire class was disgusting and said a lot about the talent level over there. Class Green had several trainees who would beat Aegle any day of the week, but Class Red apparently had zero. Having more trainees didn’t mean anything if they were all shitters, frankly, and this match would prove it to anyone who still refused to believe that simple truth.
Argent would win this easily, and so would Rosalia. Colton needed to do better than either of them would do to justify his place here, and he was confident he could do that. Rose would fuck around and let the match run longer than it needed to, and Argent wasn’t cold blooded enough to actually start with everything he has out of some misguided sense of restraint. The goal here for the Argus native was ten seconds, with either an aura breakage or a ring out happening after that time. The only real risk, then, would be if he misjudged the distance and Aegle’s aura didn’t break if he tried to smash it, or if she managed to not be flung out of the ring if he went that route.
That would mean that Colton would have to walk over to finish the job, which would probably take about an extra minute. That wouldn’t be ideal, frankly, so hopefully it didn’t come to that. Colton’s posturing was aggressive, and he placed himself the closest he could be to his opponent, which meant that the maximum distance she could be away from him is twenty-five meters if she was at the back of her area or twenty if she was in the front. The area was only fifty square meters across, which meant a ring out was possible if he followed through the entire way out of his own semblance range. Yeah, that was probably best.
He wasn’t exactly personally invested in this matchup, so the best course of action was just to finish this as quickly as possible and to ensure that he never got hit. Aegle wasn’t very intimidating, but she also wasn’t braindead and likely had some sort of trick up her sleeve in the mold of Qiu’li desperately trying to stay relevant by googling random engineering projects on the internet to cook up. Why would Colton give her an opportunity to use whatever that plan was? Why would he allow the match to have even a one percent chance of his opponent winning and robbing him of the opportunity to represent his school and make good on that public relations opportunity to bring in more people? Why would he let his ego give Aegle of all people the opportunity to embarrass herself on national television?
He wouldn’t.
He wouldn’t engage with the ravings of an insane person and would instead sprint forward when the match started and rely entirely on his semblance for this one. His shield would go flying first in what was his usual opener, with the shield blocking line of sight from seeing the sword that was always flying behind it. What typically happened then was the redirection of the sword with the opportunity and the simultaneous attack of both, but the fact of the matter was that Aegle’s aura was probably strong enough to withstand that if she won a slugfest with Qiu’li.
Instead, the shield would go high and then unnaturally go low in not an attack, but a reposition without losing much momentum. What the goal was for the shield to get at least partially under the feet of his opponent so that he could blast upwards with Polarity to get the girl off-balance at worst and airborne at best in an unusual expenditure of aura for the former champion. The sword would come in, dust enhancement activated lighting the cutting edge bright rid with fire dust at chest level with full force forward aiming for the middle of Aegle’s torso and continuously blasting forward. It was an attack, yes, in the same manner a spear would be tossed, but unlike his usual style Colton wouldn’t actually pull the sword back. He would continue slamming forward with Polarity on the sword and trying to knock Aegle either off balance or in the air with his shield on the ground.
If she fell, great! The shield could catch the fall and he could just toss that outside the arena. The shield didn’t have its dust activated and frankly wouldn’t be no matter how this match went. The problem with the dust is that it didn’t do its full damage immediately, so unless he used it at the very beginning there was no point in using it if his goal was a speed run. He’d continue to move forward enough to continue to drive Polarity forward but had zero issues just pushing both of his weapons out of his range if it looked like Aegle could just be blasted off the arena immediately.
That was the entire point, after all. Anyone with any sort of manipulation over solid objects could have done literally the exact same thing, but they chose not to do it for some reason. While Aegle likely had brain damage to account for the derangement, she was still somehow one of the smarter ones in her class. If he had to guess, she probably ran her mouth to make Kishka actually go in close during their match. It wouldn’t be hard, considering she had separated Argent and Kishka during the draft. Qiu’li was dumb as a rock so he had no trouble believing that Aegle had come up with some sort of basic strategy to get rid of him that was honestly probably the more impressive of the two wins.
There was nothing she could actually say to Colton that would rile him up enough for him to completely throw away his uncontestable ranged advantage to come in and trade punches with the person who could only throw punches. Even if she did go digging around his files and the intranet for things to piss him off like she likely did with Kishka, it wouldn’t be anything except an act of desperation at this point. Nah, honestly, with the quality of strategy being displayed by Class Red and the complete lack of regard Aegle had for her own life Colton could almost guarantee he knew what the secret plan was.
It was a bomb that she’d detonate when she got close. That would explain the extra bulk that seemed to be present beneath the cripple’s clothing today and would fit in with the themes on display over there. If he was right, though, it’s not like he cared very much. If it detonated when she got rung out, she had aura to protect herself. If she decided to detonate it after her aura ran out after clawing her way back against Polarity somehow, that was just natural selection at work. Neither was really his problem, and that guess was really just a wild one thrown out there as something that was both dumb enough and self-destructive enough to fit the bill of ‘Plans Aegle might actually try in a high stakes match’. If she didn’t do it today, the brunette was positive she’d do it in the future at some point. Maybe even against Kishka, who would no doubt be amazed that someone could have so little regard for their personal safety and lose a second match against her due to that surprise.
Well, regardless, this was over. Colton was still sore from yesterday’s final and Aegle probably was too, so after this they could just get up and go home to recover from those slugfests rather than waste any more time here.
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MADE BY MIZO