Katsuki Bakugo v. Altanis

[King Shark]

The scent in the air was gunpowder and death, and it hung over the area in a fog. Hearing as he’d known it had become a thing of the past; when his ears weren’t ringing in the wake of mortar fire, he was taking in the deep bass and rumbling of the shells hitting the ground around him. Mud and bits of earth sprayed him periodically when he got the gumption to poke his head out of the trench, but that wasn’t often, and he’d been hunkered down for enough hours at this point that the shock of his situation had worn off and he’d strode calmly into the numb of a soldier under fire. In a situation like his the human ego took a backseat to allow instinct and reflexes to drive the body - though some part of his personality and to a smaller degree his tactician’s mind acknowledged the dire situation and put it on the back burner to process once it was over.

Back pressed against the once reinforced trench wall behind him, Katsuki Bakugo put an unfiltered cigarette to his lips and ignited it without any tool by placing his thumb and forefinger to the tip of the thing and igniting them. Around the other soldiers he’d kept his Quirk under wrap, but there were no soldiers around him now. Only the husks of the men the soldiers had been strewn about the ground past the lip of the trench, and the rest of their platoon that’d been lucky enough to retreat had greater worries than a super-powered grunt that had once been in their midst.

Then, all of a sudden, there was silence.

The young spit-fire stayed still for a few moments out of habit, and then thumbed his helmet up far enough to reveal a lick of ash-blonde hair before digging a pinky into his ear where he twisted it, probing, and removed it. The ringing subsided, but the sound of shelling hadn’t resumed. It seemed that a lull had occurred - the eye of the storm, he thought in bitter humor.

With a surge of bold ambition Katsuki Bakugo stood up cautiously and allowed his ruby eyes to crest the edge of the trench - his home for now - and scan the horizon. He took in a Hell-scape: barbed wire slashed a barren waste that could house no life, and it teased forth the ironic mental picture of a grassland in his mind. It was hard to believe that one had existed in this place before the war. Though the Earth may once have been hard-pack, it was now slippery and treacherous with mud born from days of rain and ceaseless mortar-fire. Bodies were the only punctuation in the bleak expanse of land known, fittingly, as No Man’s Land to the persons unlucky enough to be privy to it. He knew that it stretched on for the length of at least a few fields before it ended at the enemy’s trench, and he knew just as well that the trench across that desolate patch of land was likely as abandoned as this one save for a man or two as unlucky as Bakugo who’d ended up caught there seeking shelter from the shells.

...but his eyes stopped dead on something he hadn’t expected.

There stood something, breaking up the melancholy of death, that he hadn’t expected to see. At first he thought it was a dead body stiff with rigor mortis sitting on the shoulders of a horse, and he had to rub his eyes and take a closer look before he realized that it was both a person AND a horse. Some part of himself remembered from stories told to him as a boy: a centaur. Dark grey at the body, which was well-muscled and that of a war-horse, but crimson past the cut-off that separated humanoid from equine; she stood regal and proud, resplendent in hues of silver, crimson, and grey. It was as if she was untouched by the mortar shells excepting some earthy residue on either of her torsos.

Bakugo felt himself drawn, and rose up out of the trench. He started across the gap between the two of them, and noticed that she had caught a glimpse of him as well and had trained her eyes - eyes that dazzled with intelligence and cunning - on him. In what was a span of breaths but felt like an eternity he closed the gap between them and found himself but a few yards from the ethereal oddity, whereupon he drew himself up to his full height compelled by something he could not understand.

He’d long since abandoned his company standard gear. Now, he wore only the turtle-shell helmet standard issue to infantry, the dog tags given to him upon enlistment, and baggy military fatigues of grey and black camoflauge that gave way to a tight-fit black tank-top. He’d long since abandoned his gun; here, in Hell, he’d need nothing other than his innate abilities.

And then she spoke.

“A wretched sight, and an unexpected one. You’ve survived the shells - by some luck, divine providence, or are you something different?” she asked, with the quirk of a smile.

Bakugo found himself in that moment - the self that had something the other soldiers did not have. He brought up his hand in answer, which crackled with sweat not unlike nitroglycerin threatening to explode. It sparked and popped like a cheap sparkler, though, it was not telling of how powerful his talent could be.

“Katsuki Bakugo,” he introduced, his voice dry and shirked. It sounded like it’d come from someone else - maybe all the chain smoking, maybe the lack of use it’d had - but it sounded confident like that of a man possessed. “...you don’t belong here.”

At that, his foe seemed to posture herself in the universal language of aggression. She turned towards him and pawed at the ground with hooves - HOOVES - and held her head a little higher. That had bore horns the way a knight might bear regalia.

“No, no, little one,” she answered patronizingly. “I am Altanis, and I believe that it is YOU who does not belong.”

At that she charged, but the soldier in him took over and he launched into the air in a vault. Though she stood nearly ten feet high, he threw his hands behind him and popped off two quick blasts that propulsed him in a parabolic arc over his foe’s charge so that he landed on her other side. As she wheeled about to face him the centaur encountered an explosion not unlike the mortars themselves, which she just managed to sidestep in a deft display of reflex not unlike his own.

“Not luck, then,” Altanis answered, looking at him more seriously. “Then I’ll have to snuff out that fire.”

“...good luck,” Katsuki began to say…

But everything after ‘good’ was snuffed out by a distant explosion that sent a shower of earthen debris raining down on them anew. The mortars had renewed their ugly, haunting percussion, and they seemed uncaring of the fight that had begun in No Man’s Land.

Bakugo scowled, dropped his head and his body into a position of readiness, and felt his helmet fall down to his brow in concerto.

“Then let’s DANCE!” he bellowed, and he sprung too, though his words were lost in the deafening sounds of the shells.

Participants: Katsuki Bakugo and Altanis
Reason: Opposite sides of a one-shot war
Rules: Three posts each
Judge: Jade
Setting: A battlefield in WWI being bombaded by mortars

 

[Altanis]

The brash young soldier sprung forward, ready for a fight.

In retaliation, the opposing general merely scowled dismissively down at him and lashed out with a perfunctory swipe of her clawed nails.

As expected from his previous display of mobility, the youth was well-prepared and able to avoid the almost lazy strike. He changed direction-mid charge, a burst of explosive force from one hand sending him at a sharp angle from his previous direction. The speed behind his launch was greater now, and for a moment a look of puzzlement flashed across the centaur's face. Only for a moment, though; she could spare little more than that if she wanted to avoid the imminent follow up.

A second, much more earnest swipe of her opposite arm served to ward off the immediate charge to capitalize on the opening she had left, forcing the young soldier to back away for a moment.

A fierce whining noise droned in the air mere seconds before the impact of another mortar perilously close by shook the earth beneath them. Bakugo cursed under his breath as he involuntarily staggered half a pace from the impact, only his familiarity wit explosions at a much shorter proximity sparing him from being completely floored.

Altanis, however...could only adopt a vicious, leering grin. She had been enduring worse than this for far, far longer than this little brat could even begin to imagine. Greater explosions, that rocked entire cities and not just this pitiful stretch of blasted mud and death. Her posture and composure were unbreakable, her footing sturdy and unshaken. She seized the moment.

Like a coiled viper, she struck, lunging with all the grace her inhuman form belied her possessing. She was met with a wide-eyed stare of mingled shock and anger as she did so, the gleaming black of her demonic talons flashing. A spear-hand strike tore a grazing wound along the side of the explosive young soldier's neck, the freshly blossoming gash earning naught but an irritated grunt from him.

In retaliation, however...he swung one arm up and latched his hand onto his foe's outstretched forearm with a vice-like grip.

"Unhand me, you...!" she snarled, but her threats were cut off immediately by an unexpected blast.

The force of it blew Bakugo's hand away from his target's arm, and he spun with the blast into a crazy cartwheeling flip. He sailed through the air, tucking into several awkward flips and rolls in his barely controlled flight, until he landed in the mud and grime in a half-crouch, breathing heavily.

Altanis had been similarly thrown away, the force of the explosion wrenching her arm across her torso and making her drunkenly stagger and stumble several paces. It had not truly toppled her, but only just.

What it had done was utterly destroy the already mud-flecked sleeve of her miraculously still-intact uniform. The grime-coated fabric had been blown away entirely to her mid-bicep, the crimson skin beneath it now sporting a multitude of deep burns and horrid bruising. As it numbly dropped back down to hang at her side it swayed limply with her heaving breaths, fingers twitching erratically, as inky black blood slowly ran down her arm in thin rivulets.

"That...was a mistake, child," she hissed. The venom in her voice carried clearly over the haunting, explosive song of the battlefield.

"The only mistake here is you underestimating me," he sneered in response, getting back up to a full standing posture. He slowly flexed the fingers of both hands, eliciting several pops and cracks as well as a cascade of sparks and minuscule explosions. "I'm not just some no-name grunt like everyone else on this damn battlefield!"

"As you have succinctly demonstrated." She sucked in one final breath and straightened up. With only a grimace of pain to sow for it, she slowly tried to move her blasted arm, though only managed slowly curling her bloodied hand into a fist. "Relish in the fact you have been the first one in this war thus far to draw blood from me, in such a direct encounter. You would no doubt earn some ridiculous medal, if you survived."

Further banter was drowned out by the rhythmic thumping and pounding of mortar fire, blasting apart the battlefield. First close at and, then a dull rumble in the distance, then a reverberating boom in the near distance. The ground shook, mud and dirt filled the air with a choking haze, and both combatants charged heedlessly through it again.

A swift lunging swipe with her undamaged arm was deftly avoided, Bakugo sailing up, over and around her with ease. He swept his arm down to launch an explosion at her, fully expecting the dodge he knew was coming.

...but it didn't.

His hand came down, slapping the well-muscled war horse portion of his opponent just as he released the explosion. His eyes narrowed briefly in surprise and confusion, trying to figure out why she hadn't even tried to dodge...

Then he realized why, all too physically.

A sharp crack from his chest, followed by a ringing in his ears as all the air in his lungs was driven out. Through spots of white suddenly filling his vision, he dimly registered the rear legs of the centaur stomping back down into the dirt. As he ragdolled away, tumbling and flopping breathlessly through the mud, he could piece it together easily enough. He didn't even need to see the muddy hoofprints on what remained of his shirt -- or his chest, where the kick had torn through the weathered fabric entirely.