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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.
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