Fight:Valentin challenges Leifong in hopes of obtaining an Apprenticeship

Background

Valentin, a scleratus of the Necromancer's guild, challenges the Magister Letum Leifong in the hopes of proving his worth as a potential apprentice.

OOC Details

An informal no-stakes duel between members of the Necromancer's Guild.

Post Limit: 12 minutes, Valentin to have first attack and last defense.

The idea was to help knock off some rust, and get some practice in.

Setting: Vailkrin Graveyard

You now stand in the main area of the graveyard, various tombstones and grave spread out across this place, many of the graves have been dug up, and empty caskets lay about the cold ground. Why have they been dug up you may think, but it's clear this place is hardly ever used to rest the dead, but more of a recruiting grounds for the necromancers that inhabit this town, somehow it feels disturbing to you, unless you happen to be a necromancer yourself? To the south is an old looking temple of some kind.

Dancing with the Devil

Valentin, a scleratus of the Necromancer's guild, knew that to properly impress the Magister Letum he'd have to give a good accounting of himself in this test. Leifong, Magister Letum and Haruspex, was renowned as being short on patience and long on punishment should a student fail to meet the expected benchmarks. Standing in the graveyard, impassive expression beneath his bowler hat, Valentin starts his incantation. Writhing over his tongue comes a cacophony of dissonant sibillants, rasping against each other as his shadow lengthens at great speed towards Leifong before rising up before him. As the Scleratus' cantatus proceeds, the shadow takes solid form as it follows whatever movements Leifong may make. It expands in size to develop four arms and one malicious smirk. When the cantatus of the shadow golem is completed, Valentin, butcher of Cenril, draws his oversized cleaver, and in the same motion four similar cleavers appear in the hands of his temporary shadowgolem. As Valentin starts to move in a round-about course through the graveyard towards Leifong, planning to use the headstones as cover, he focuses his will on the golem, and in a sequence of swift movements it slashes towards Leifong and his shadow, targeting the arms on both in hopes of hampering his spellcasting.

Leifong watches rather impassively as the subject of this examination begins his spellwork, carefully noting the other man's methods and the expertise with which he wielded magic. That was the point of this after all, was it not. So it is that the mad butcher's shadow golem manages to advance upon him without any effort made to retreat. His attention was to remain focused unwaveringly on Valentin as the man picked his way carefully through the graveyard making effective use of cover until a mere moment before the shadow golem's cleavers were upon him. Making sudden use of his shadow magic the priest moves rapidly back, his shrouded form seeming to warp and twist in an impossible fashion as the first set of two blades tears through nothing but the condensed darkness of the priest's robes, scattering them momentarily like smoke to reveal a sickening bit of rotting flesh which might at one point have been identifiable as a human shoulder.

Valentin assumes the Haruspex is testing his self-control and strategic restraint by not attacking, hoping to lure him into foolish overextension. Conversely, the scleratus takes a more measured approach, slowing his own speed and obscuring himself completely behind one monument of a weeping angel. As the golem continues its swift pursuit of Leifong, acting under its last orders to target the Haruspex' arms, Valentin summons again his own ingenious approach with the shadows, binding his essence with them to sink into an inky incorporeal pool. Assuming that Leifong was still making efforts to evade his golem, Valentin slips across the dark cemetary, one shadow among many. Valentin is swift to spot Leifong, pursued as he was by a distinctive four-armed shadow. It was time to once again stretch his limits. Valentin had thought long and hard since his attack on the minotaurs, and realised he had expelled far more mana than was required through crude technique. Summoning his ability for the 'hidden whispers', a psionic talent allowing speech with no tongue, he incants again while incorporeal, harsh syllables coming from everywhere and nowhere in the graveyard, and this cantatus binds a section of a headstone's shadow with the Pyrumbral tides, a tendril of black flame whipping out to intercept Leifong's retreat and target his back as the golem recommences its sequence of slashing attacks.

Leifong was moving just a bit too quickly for the cleaver weilding golem, slipping out of range over and over as the thing continued to advance, swinging for his arms. He was careful to keep his attention tuned to the butcher, far more concerned with master than puppet. Yet as the golem manages to catch the very edge of Leifong's arm, spilling a foul stench and freeing several maggots from their host, the priest becomes distracted and a moment later Valentin is gone. He was impressed enough, deciding to go on the offensive and see how well the gruff human could perform under pressure, when suddenly he makes a key error. Evading those cleavers yet again, the priest backs straight into a sudden blast of dark flames, and the dense cloak of shadow wrapped about his form disintegrates into the ether as his flesh bubbles. A horrendus shriek fills the air, reverberating around the graveyard at an unnatural volume that molests the auditory senses, and as though a herald of coming doom that shriek signals the sudden expansion of utter darkness out in an orb from where the priest was struck. A series of rapturous noises come to pass in the moment of utter black, tremors rippling through the ground as great arching veins of bone tear their way through recently disturbed soil in intersecting patters, demolishing masses of gravestones in their search to brutalize the butcher from all directions.

Valentin would have grinned as the black flames made contact, save for the tell-tale signs of the impending headache signifying the commencement of magical recoil as the scleratus overextended his capabilities once again. Recalling well the consequences of ignoring that warning, Valentin is forced to immediately release all of his umbral weavings. The shadow golem vanishes, as does the tendril of flame, and Valentin was once more corporeal - and his timing could not have been worse. The ground shakes the butcher off-balance, and Valentin swiftly finds himself sent flying by a large tendril of animate bone slamming against his prone torso, his undead flesh and stained clothes brutally rent and torn before he crashes against a gravestone. But Valentin was not one for giving in, and the impact does not cause him to drop his cleaver, despite cracked and broken ribs. As another bone tendril narrowly misses him, he heaves his cleaver into it embedding it to once more enter the air, albeit in a more controlled fashion as he wraps an arm around the tendril. At the height of its whipping motion, where gravity began to exert influence, Valentin unhooks the cleaver from the bone and pushes off into a diving freefall towards where he had last seen Leifong, the oversized mithril cleaver held before him in both hands hopes the injured Haruspex hadn't been able to move, and would have that blade chisel into him with the burly butcher's weight and momentum behind it.

Leifong seethes with rage at being torched, his emotions lending a certain wild fury the to nature of his power as the unnatural blanket of darkness spikes and ripples in a less than controlled manner. Yet the priest soon finds his discipline once more, allowing the numerous tendrils of bone now scattered about the graveyard to once more become innanimate as his wall of shadow retreats to allow light on the battle once more. And just in time to find the butcher hurtling down from above with his vicious weapon already in mid swing for his uncloaked frame. It was a rare honor to see the haruspex as he truly was now, an honor survived only by one other living being. Without his guise of power Leifong was a monster, his body withered and perverted, little more than a skeleton wrapped in horribly bruised too-tight skin which cracked at stress points and joints. His gut and chest cavity are sunken in, most of the organs contained within having been removed. Both of his legs hacked away and replaced with the digitigrade limbs of a satyr, cloven hooves dug firmly into the ground. A spiderweb of unholy tattoos and artwork cover every inch of his body above the wrist and below the neck, some of which glow faintly, the power of the arrays built into his flesh the only thing keeping his sickening corpse moving. The creature which Leifong had become since his death and reanimation twists it's neck to a disturbing angle, sheer hatred burning in those cold grey eyes sunken into dark little pits among a horribly scarred and deformed face which resembled a demon of lore more than a man's. He scrambls to bring up a wall of bone around himself, a shield to protect him from physical harm, yet it remains little more than a third finished as Valentin slams brutally into him, that cleaver tearing through the priest's shoulder as easily as a pig's. The haruspex crumples, his frail body collapsing under the butcher's overbearing weight, spinal column cracking as it is forced into the spiked lip of the very wall that had been conjured in hopes of protecting him. Like a broken toy, Leifong lays twitching on the ground below his opponent, chest split nearly in twain by that oversized knife. Valentin may wonder if he'd actually slaughtered the Magister Letum... from all the evidence it would seem that way. That is until a great shudder racks Leifong's body, and like a puppet suddenly given life the priest jolts upward, mangled hands snapping toward Valentin's face and chest while all of the digits upon them elongate, tendrils of shadow forming from the air into a coating around them, forming little spears which move with the speed and power required to punch straight through the butcher's flesh from once side to the other and leave ten bleeding holes through brain, heart, lungs, and anything else they could find.

Valentin wasn't the type to believe any master of Necromancy was dead unless they were burned to ashes and spread out over several continents. However, his own injuries were copious, and the butcher is slow to recover from his attack, partially skewered as he was by the Haruspex' own bony defense. But he was upright enough to hurl himself backwards and to the side as that grotesque form shudders to life, his reflexive flight enough to save him from more than several puncture wounds to his left shoulder. The scleratus grunts in pain and grumbles as he retreats further to examine the damage he has received. He ceases his offense, having run out of magical reserves "A'right, you've made y'blimmin' point, innit. You're a nasty bugger when y'get annoyed, Haruspex. Take your anger out on somethin' with a pulse, eh? It's bleedin' obvious I'm goin' t'need to work on buildin' my reserves o'power if I'm goin' to face you on equal grounds any time soon, guv." The scleratus stumbles back against a gravestone before saying "On that subject, d'you have a free spot for a 'Prentice?"

Aftermath of the Examination

Leifong 's body straightens up in a disgusting fashion, bits of the bone wall which had torn into his back making gross suction noises as they slide out of him. Copius amounts of black sludge interspersed with little chunks of flesh and the occasional parasite dripping out onto hallowed ground. The priest was grabbling with his vindictive nature, choking back the desire to cast the final blow here and now while Valentin was weary and weakened. Yet logic and reasoning win out, forcing him to remember why it was that they were here in the first place, and the fact that any man who could wound him, was a far step above average. Such competent men were hard to find... and it was always useful to have competent allies... tools. Leifong moves like a crippled plaything toward the butcher, his chest splitting at certain angles with each step, and as he nears the tombstone on which Valentin rests, the priest rips that cleaver out of his body and tosses it back. "You start training tomorrow." He says in a fully detached manner, the sound coming from two valve like slits on either side his throat rather than his lips, which do not move. Bits of shadow are slowly drawn to Leifong from all around, swirling about his form like a cloud which gradually forms the dense 'robes' which normally conceal his body. "The first time you fail, i will hurt you. The second time, i will kill you. Do not fail. Ever." apparently that was an acceptance? Though given the fact that Leifong had done far worse than kill his last student, one can assume that he has a certain fondness for the butcher.

Valentin nods, grimacing in discomfort as his shoulder and ribs protest "Makes sense t'me, Haruspex. No point in coddlin' 'Prentices if'n they're meant to turn out worth a damn. Tomorrow it is." The scleratus would then collect his bowler hat, place it on his head, tip it in the Haruspex' direction, then lurch off towards the graveyard exit.