INFILTRATING GINYU SCHOOL [x2 TRAINING, CLOSED]

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

[ooc: Wearing training clothes. And no, despite the title, this does not mean that he's joined the school.]

There were fifty of them.

Humans, that was.

Slaves, miscreants, mercenaries, assassin. To most it would be a mismatched bunch at best, but Lucas could already grasp - a whisper here, an unguarded tightened fist there - at the faint edges of of how this would unfold. There were already twelve competing groups, made of anywhere between one and six people. Sometimes they switched allegiances. Body language was an imprecise art at best.

Well, there were thirteen groups technically. But for all intents and purposes, one was effectively out of the picture. No one without a death wish would attack the alien, after all. Approximately ten feet tall, it had sixteen eyes in eight alternating rows, each pupil rapidly cycling through various colors. The effect was somewhat bizarre.

He would also, nine times out of ten, be quite effectively defeated by it. And that was an optimistic assessment.

"GRUBS," the alien instructor called out. "THIS IS WHAT WE CALL A GRAVITY CHAMBER. WE'RE PUTTING IT ON A LOW SETTING BECAUSE YOU'RE EFFING GRUBS AND CAN'T DO JACK ALL WITHOUT US GUIDING YOU BY YOUR WEAK, FRAGILE LITTLE PINCERS."

Murmurs of discontent. Lucas braced himself.

"HAVE A TASTE."

Then the gravity doubled.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

People buckled.

Lucas made a mental note of who they were and lowered their threat rating to negligible. One of them - a redhead with dark skin - was faking it, but not particularly well. Instinctive weight redistribution rested on bracing the legs, not hunching the shoulders. A laudable effort at trickery but rather obvious.

Lucas didn't try to trick anyone. He was here, oddly enough,to stand out. Doing anything else would be counterproductive.

If the others were faking it...

"HEH. FEEL THAT? THAT'S NOTHING. NOW YOU KNOW THE DRILL. HOP TO IT."

There was one way for humans to join the infamous Ginyu school. While the legalese was rather complicated and had been designed by the best lawyers in the galaxy it ultimately boiled down to one simple thing: climbing upon a mountain of their fellows. Their bloody, bleeding, broken fellows. Lucas didn't smirk or smile as he carefully stretched forwards, limbs tensing in anticipation. This would, very soon, become a bloodbath. And like proper bloodbaths it would be over fast.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

There wasn't much room in the gravity chamber. Even if it was one of the alien-only training chambers, of far greater quality and size than what was usually at the disposal of mere humans, gravity manipulation technology had only come so far. Its energy requirements were leaching almost half the energy of West City's grid as it was and the space necessary for fifty humans to fight comfortably certainly wasn't available.

Probably why someone tried to deck him from behind.

Lucas caught the blow, letting it glance off his shoulder as he spun around to kick his aggressor. The motion was awkward - he had overcompensated for the superior gravity and nearly whipped around into the wrong direction entirely - but managed to launch the kick anyway. For a near baseline human fighter, his opponent was rather good, managing to hop back and raise his arms to guard against the attack.

Unfortunately, Lucas was a bit beyond 'baseline.' The kick shattered his opponent's arms - a rather satisfying crack as the bones all but liquefied - and then chucked the warrior back ten feet, bowling through other fighters and only stopping when he hit the wall.

He didn't get up again.

Forty-nine left.

Lucas cracked his knuckles. If this was a proper assignment, he would have considered that attack sloppy. Precision was just as important as power, after all. And for the fighters here that could only rise through the ranks by climbing on the backs of their fellows, he had just painted a giant target on his forehead.

Fortunately, this particular job required such ostentatious displays of power.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"Holy horseapples," some terribly polite person swore, staring unbelievingly at the carnage.

The room had frozen. They had good instincts, these fighters. Veterans, if you will. They knew the score, knew what exactly a human could accomplish even if it was as ridiculous as take out an entire army all on his lonesome. There would be no resistance, no hope of fighting back, just a slim unlikely possibility of mercy.

So they stayed still. The bastard couldn't attack all of them at once, right? And there was supposed to be five left after this battle royale idiodicy was over, right?

Lucas didn't care. The world was about to turn a terribly decadent shade of red. Yes, one might even term it obscene if they were trying to be cute about it. But Lucas never tried to be cute about anything, even something as beautiful as a canvas of broken bones and mutilated corpses, of cracked heads and damaged eyes, of spines snapped and arms pulled too far rightwards or too far rightways and spines poked and prodded like a chiropractor turned into a lumberjack.

He took in a deep breath and let his power slowly seep out, letting those get a feel for how deeply and permanently they had been screwed.

Really, it was incredibly unfair. Like crushing small animals that couldn't defend themselves.

Someone with a conscience might even give a damn.

He didn't have one though. Not even an angel or a devil.

Just a little voice in the back of his head that counted all the deaths it could manage. A gambler. An addict. A high-functioning sociopath.

The number it came up seemed suspiciously round.

Five minutes.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:00:20

Since they weren't coming to him he came to them. With each breath he got a little more data, a little clearer understanding of how the physics of the fight changed with increased gravity. He could feel his heart beat, responding to the increased pressure with a laudable attempt to keep everything at a proper hemostatic stasis.

Then there was two of him.

One of him seemed a little faint - it was a poorly pulled off afterimage, a little too slow in both the initial execution and the subsequent pull out. Against a skilled opponent it would have been seen through in an instant and countered with proper alacrity or even contempt. He would have to improve its execution the next time around.

Redundant as it is to say, these opponents were not skilled. By the time they realized he had managed to pull off a high level technique in unfamiliar gravity he was already there in front of them. Lucas slammed his foot into the lower jaw of the closest, straight into the fragile hinge where bone met bone met three important muscles. It nearly came off altogether in a messy fountain of blood.

Hm. Not enough power.

He snapped his kick in the opposite direction, just before the fighter would have taken the time to bellow his pain, taking him in the other job, probably dis-dislocating it back into place and sending him slamming into the wall as well. The others were starting to react but their fists went through him.

Another after-image. A better one, this time.

At this rate it'd take much longer than five minutes to end this. Better pick up the pace.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 48

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:00:25

The next afterimage took him to a fighter of negligible strength. There was a flash of fear in his eyes as he tried to get his arms up to ward off the blow he could tell was coming. Lucas' powered through it, palm slamming into the target's nose, driving the sharp bone that lay at the top of it straight into his brain. Surprisingly, in the brief span of time it took to execute that motion a different fighter managed to hit him with a ki attack.

It was a little wobbly, no doubt due to the gravity.

But still, ki attack. And one of not negligible strength either.

Lucas couldn't manage anything past a faint glow. And even that wasn't a sure thing yet. The attack burned through the back of his coat, shredding skin and nearly making a perfectly round cauterized hole on the flesh beneath. Lucas grit his teeth as he started circulating his ki more heavily letting it absorb the damage rather than his body. Turning around he vanished again.

When he re-appeared it was in front of his attacker.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 47

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:00:40

"Picking on the weak, huh?" the redhead asked, blustering a bit. Lucas ignored him, preferring to analyze his style. The boy had a good stance, solid footing and some strong-fist type kung fu style if he was any judge. His fist lashed out and was surprisingly countered, knocking his fist away by hitting the inside of his wrist and heading straight for his head.

He avoided, naturally.

In the brief exchange of blows the rest of the fighters had clearly recovered from whatever shock that had rooted them to the floor. Although an unspoken truce might have allowed them some chance at survival, a different fighter - one wearing an orange jumpsuit - quickly put an end to that notion by beginning his own bloodbath. Although slow every move he made was one that killed.

A neat killer too. Not a single one of his victims bled. They weren't any less dead for the privilege but it was an interesting technique.

Lucas vanished - and was nearly amazed to see his opponent do the same. Numbers revised themselves upwards. Ten minutes now, perhaps? More? Hard to say. Diving through the crowd of fighters the two of them played a brutal game of cat and mouse that caught dozens of others in the crossfire, haphazard blows leaving a trail of broken bodies in their wake as they fought at a level few others here could match.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 44

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:00:55

Another ten seconds ticked by, kicks and feints and hooks lashing out with a deceptive frequency. The Hargrave assassin felt himself start to get a little pressed, was his opponent getting faster? The unfamiliar gravity combined with the weighted training clothes and the surprisingly competent fighter were starting to stack the odds against him.

An unconscious smirk lit his features.

Well. This was interesting.

"Where the hell did you get this skill?!" the other guy laughed, gloved fist aiming to take out half his rib cage. He blocked with an outstretched palm, feeling the blow tingle up through his arm, countering with an immediate high kick to the head. The redhead vanished, letting the cramped corners mean that his blow fell on a different, hapless foe. Given the ridiculous amount of power he'd put in the kick the guy all but crumbled.

Lucas didn't answer, already hitting the ground to vanish and keep up. His weakness would be his stamina. If he couldn't manage to get his foe down for the count within the next thirty or seconds this would definitely start taking a turn for the worse. For him, anyway. Might even lead to the non-completion of his contract.

In the immortal words of two twins he knew: whoopsy-daisy.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 40

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:01:05

"You're the shitty stoic type, aren't you?" the fighter asked, wasting breath on idle questions. Either it was a show of bravado or an attempt to make an unspoken alliance. With their power, it'd be almost certain they could wipe out the remaining opposition within a minimal amount of time.

He'd consider it.

Lucas aimed for a headbutt that got nowhere. The redhead countered with a blow to his solar plexus that he had to twist out of just in the nick of time. Both of them tried a leg sweep that was aborted the moment they noticed they were doing the same thing. Despite the fact that a countdown was telling him this would start to become dangerous quite quickly Lucas couldn't help but think that-

Well. This was exhilarating too. One of those uncertain blindspots where his brain just couldn't get a grasp on how the fight would flow and could come up with neither hard numbers nor answers. A situation where no one knew how the outcome would end up.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 38

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:01:15

Trading blows in the weighted uniform was starting to become a liability. He could feel his lungs start to burn and his muscles hiss with the strain of the fight. Worse, the other fighter knew it.

"Starting to slow down!" the redhead crowed, laughing as he sent a whip-like blow past his defenses to slam into his temple. At the last second Lucas managed to twist his head, letting the blow glance off his forehead instead, gashing it but making no more than a superficial wound.

Welp. Looked like he'd have to start switching tactics.

With another afterimage (he'd have a limited monopoly on those now that his stamina was starting to run out) he appeared behind a fighter that appeared to be wearing a toga. The redhead slammed into and through the other guy, in that moment where his vision was obscured by the following body of the other fighter Lucas re-appeared behind him and tried slamming the base of his hand into the small of the redhead's neck.

Might have even worked if another fighter hadn't barreled into him, trying to keep him off guard.

"GET HIM," the brute shouted.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 35

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:01:30

He killed his new attacker through the simple expedient of slamming his fist through his chest. It emerged on the other side sticky with blood and gore.

An unconscionable lapse in judgment given his surroundings.

"You have time to play around with others?" a voice whispered from his back. The next moment he felt himself airborn, a solid kick having slammed into his waist and sent him flying. Before he could complete his trajectory another blow hand sent him spinning away into an opposite, equally airborne motion.

Huh.

This would have been a really handy time to know how to fly.

Then again, there were few situations in which the ability to fly would be a disadvantage. Most of them probably social.

Using his body as a bowling ball to scatter the tenpins that were the other fighters was not the most dignified way to go, Lucas decided but so long as he was being battered around he couldn't see how he'd escape. Not with the world as it flew by, somehow just out of reach between ceiling and floor.

Perhaps he should admit it: he'd greatly underestimated the other fighter. Egregiously so, even.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 33

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:02:00

This was starting to hurt.

Unfortunate. Blood loss was clearing the haze in his brain. Like a hiker climbing a mountain he started to discard the useless bits of him. His annoyance with humanity. His first name. His identity. His love of birds. His careful patience. The job. The contract. His status as an assassin. His middle name.

They weighed his brain down. Made him slow. Put the gambler in the back of his brain. The addict wasn't supposed to be let out, you see. Because an addict always found a way to get the next hit. Always found a way to find a pusher. Always found another ten bucks in cold hard, blood soaked cash.

Even if it killed him to get it.

Usually he kept it under a leash. Kept it locked tight next to the rules and the compromises and the wistful little wishes that were part family and part whimsy. Kept it right there next to him so it could whisper to him advice as he calmly and methodically fought his way forwards through the next street and corridor, and then the next one and then the next.

But now with death looking like an almost possibility he let the leash slip just a fraction.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 29

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

2:05

The next kick he saw coming.

Sensed might have been a more appropriate term. Grabbed the leg. Didn't bother with finesse, it was about to hit him the face.

He bit down.

Someone swore. Mothersomething. Irrelevant.

Felt the blows rain down on his back and upper body. Felt his dentition grind as it fought to keep itself together. Relevant insofar as it impacted his ability to continue to fight. Made a note.

Bit down and then tore the meat and fabric out from his opponent's leg. There was a howl of pain and in one smooth motion he hooked his fingers and dug them into his opponent's eyes.

The subsequent swearing was also irrelevant.

Avoided the blind shots, dodging them by economical, almost lazy margins. Even with ki sense getting a precise fix without visual verification was not a skill just anyone could manage. He walked close and then chopped at his opponent's neck and moved on.

His opponent crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

He moved on. Slowly. Methodically. Carefully.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 28

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

00:02:30

He wasn't sure why he had wasted all that energy in the beginning. He had so little left. And now he had at least two cracked bones, numerous lacerations and massive bruising. Ki had kept more vulnerable internal organs from harm but there was a great deal of discomfort involved in moving around right now.

And it seemed his clothes were weighted. Another question mark.

Spent a millisecond weighing the pros and cons of ditching them. Couldn't. Not with so many hostiles. Too many variables to account for and their effect on his performance was within acceptable parameters.

Chaos around him as people fought.

Mostly each other.

Could wait for them to wear themselves out and then mop up the survivors. Logical thing to do.

Someone tried to aim for the back of his head. Heard the warcry before the attack connected. Ducked just below it and kicked backwards, very gently, letting his opponent's momentum carry out his own destruction.

He would do this very, very carefully. Only one strong fighter remained, a man dressed in orange, methodically taking people apart with powerful strikes that caused gruesome results to ensue from everything he hit. He would be the last or first to go.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 25

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

2:45

The opponent he kicked crumpled behind him, teeth missing and something twisted up inside that long fragmentary piece of bone called a spine.

Lucas walked forwards, arms held loosely at his sides. It was a posture that suggested tiredness but was, in fact, an invitation to realize that he would no longer defend himself and would only attack. It was confidence, it was irony, it was all this ridiculous shell had left.

The survivors had organized themselves into four groups. Two were angling around the orange one. Two were angling around him. He had eight fighters to Orange's fifteen. Perhaps there was a logic to their groupings but he could no longer read the cues at all and the particulars of their methods escaped him.

Eight opponents. All of about equal strength.

Which one first?

In his head he rolled the dice. It was more complicated than that but in the end it was guesswork. Flimsy, flimflam guesswork. Less about cards and more about basic extrapolations of how each held themselves.

His dice landed on four.

He slammed into the first body, elbow slamming into the nose with a crunching sound. Blows started coming in from the others, perhaps he'd misjudged. Lucas ducked, swept the feet from the closest ones from under them, grabbed the body in front of him by its shirt collar, footwork smoothly rotating the body so that it was between him and his assailants. His chosen opponent gurgled as he became the unintended scapegoat of a number of blows and a limited ki blast.

FIGHTERS REMAINING: 23