Hunter, Hunted [Open]

OoC: I'll be using the Emerald Knight. Link in sig. This takes place in Highrise City, mentioned in Zyke's Bio.

BiC: Zyke perched atop the tallest skyscraper in Highrise City. He inhaled deeply, taking in the sweet scent of the fresh air, so differing from the stench of pollution that lingered in the airways of Highrise's lower levels. Gathering himself, he lept from his vantage point, and began his descent, looking for anything to keep his intrest. It had been a slow night.

After a drop of about 400 stories, the Emerald Kinight pushed a hidden button on his belt. For a normal man, the bone jarring slowdown from terminal velocity would have knocked the fight, as well as a few teeth, out of him. Zyke Taylar was not a normal man. As his glider deployed, his highly trained body reacted, and he swooped into a smooth glide, enjoying the rapturous feeling of pure freedom that always came with a glide, all without missing a breath.

Now the real task began. He began looking for some crime to stop, or something to distract him from his boredom.

Atropos Belladonna perched atop one of the shorter skyscrapers in Highrise City. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with fresh air, and then exhaled it all in a preparatory sigh. Gathering herself, she leapt from her vantage point, and began her descent, keeping her eyes on the approaching ground. It was a night like any other.

As she fell, she gathered telekinetic energy below her, pushing on the air beneath her falling figure. The force of the telekinetic energy pushed away from her, and caused all the windows in the building behind her to shatter into fragments as she passed by them. Atropos was attempting to use her telekinetic ability to make herself freely airborne, and able to fly, but was so far unsuccessful. The telekinesis she gathered served to slow her down, slightly, but did little else. The ground was quickly rising towards her, and before she could do anything about it, she crashed hard onto the roof of a car parked on the street. Her fall had been slowed down enough that she didn't break any bones, but she ached all over and had a few deep wounds.

Atropos climbed down from the crumpled roof of the vehicle, dripping deep indigo blood onto the ground from a cut in her arm. She brushed herself off, and wiped away the blood on her arm. The slash underneath the blood was nearly healed already. Atropos wandered dizzily into the street, struggling to keep her balance and stay on her feet. Twice she fell over and had to stand herself back up. A car driving down the street had to swerve around her, honking its horn the whole while. Atropos glanced at the vehicle as it drove away, horn blaring. The car's windows suddenly exploded, and its tires burst into shreds. Although she couldn't see it from where she was, she knew that a particularly large shard of glass from one of the car's windows had embedded itself into the driver's forehead. Atropos then looked away and continued across the road.

On the other side of the street, Atropos entered a busy Chinese restaurant. She was quite hungry and could do for some food. She lacked money, like usual, but that never stopped her before. She made her way behind the counter, toward the kitchen. One of the employees noticed her and told her she wasn't allowed back here. Atropos simply reached out her hand towards the man, and ropes of darkness suddenly extended themselves and wrapped around the man's face. The black tentacles twisted the man's head all the way around, and then tossed the body through the restaurant's front window, onto the sidewalk. The shattering window, and the body flying through it, alerted the rest of the building that something strange was going on, and the restaurant became a panic.

Atropos continued into the kitchen. A chef tried to stop her, but she grabbed him by the neck. Small claws extended from her fingers, piercing the chef's flesh and injecting some of Atropos' dark blood into the man. His veins began to run thick and dark, spreading up his face and down his neck. As blood vessels in his eyes burst, black blood covered the surface of his eyeballs and dark tears ran down his face. Black blood began to drip from his nose as well, and finally, as he died, it began to pour from his mouth as he coughed and choked out his last breath of air. Atropos removed her hand, and the corpse dropped limply to the linoleum floor.

Seeing this, everyone else quickly fled the kitchen through the back door. Atropos found some tasty looking General Tso's chicken, freshly cooked and ready to be served to whoever had ordered it. She helped herself to the food, finishing it off with a glass of soda poured from the soda fountain. She couldn't decide which kind she wanted, so she put a little bit of everything in the glass. Lastly, before she left the kitchen, she found a fortune cookie. She cracked it open, ate it, and then read the small slip of paper that had been inside. It read "Fate looks favorably upon you."

Zyke heard a scream from the street below him. He grabbed the control straps on his glider and pulled the wings back, into a raptor's dive. A quick somersault and he landed feet first on the pavement below. Following a trail of destruction, the vigilante came upon a woman eating some Chinese food in front of what appeared to have been a restaurant. Still vey wary, Zyke approached the woman, and called to her, in a polite voice, "Did you see what happened?"

On her way out of the kitchen, Atropos noticed that most people had left the restaurant, which was odd since the food here was so good. One of the waiters had even left a serving plate full of take-out boxes of food, and Atropos willed one of the boxes to fly over to her hands. She grabbed a pair of chopsticks with which to eat the food, and then waved her hand at the door to the building. The door shattered, sending splinters everywhere, and Atropos stepped out onto the sidewalk. She noticed a few people examining the dead body in the street, and the broken vehicle still running but stranded a few yards away, but upon seeing Atropos they all fled. She paused for a moment to scratch her head, wondering what everyone was so afraid of.

Nightshade then opened the take-out box, and saw that it was full of chow mein. She tried to use the chopsticks to get the food to her mouth, but she wasn't very good at it and relied heavily on telekinesis to make sure the food actually got there and didn't fall onto the ground. While she was eating the stir-fried noodles, someone dropped out of the sky. He walked past the shattered car, raising his eyebrow when he saw the dead body in the driver's seat, and then walked by the dead body in front of the Chinese restaurant, which was covered in shattered glass from the window it was thrown through. It also had its head on backwards, a likely cause of death.

The man then looked up and saw Atropos, calling out to her. "Did you see what happened?" he asked politely, from the middle of the street. He walked over to the other side, where Atropos was leaning against the wall of the restaurant. She looked up to face the man, noodles hanging out of her mouth. Her box of chow mein was hovering in front of her, and she was holding a chopstick in either hand. As the figure approached, she slurped up the noodles, and put one of her hands underneath the take-out box.

"See what?" she replied. The man glanced behind him at the dead man. "Oh, him. I think he died. He flew through this window here," Atropos said, pointing at the window with a soy sauce covered chopstick. "And the car. It crashed." The car clearly hadn't crashed; it was still sitting in the middle of the street (albeit spread through both lanes), and there weren't any obvious dents or scratches in the chassis. "It also exploded," Atropos said, turning back to her food. The man looked back down the street at the car, noticing that it hadn't exploded. Just as he turned his head back to face Atropos, the car suddenly burst into flames, a huge fireball sending bits and pieces of shrapnel into the air. All that was left of the toasted and bent frame of the car was flipped over and burning in the street.

Atropos was occupied again with the chow mein, shoving noodles into her mouth. The man continued to watch her, clearly suspicious of something. She held the box out to him, silently offering to share if he was hungry.

Zyke ignored the offer of food, though it smelled delicious, and he hadn't eaten since this morning. He narrowed his eyes, and his words came in clipped tones, betraying the rage burining inside him.
"You did this. Why?"
Already having guessed the answer would not justify the woman's actions, Zyke's hand strayed to his hidden knife, loosening it in its sheath.

Atropos didn't answer the man's question, instead turning back to her food and ignoring him. He angrily slapped the box aside with the back of his hand, knocking it to the ground and spilling its contents in the street. Atropos took a moment to consider all the precious fried noodles, now lost to the dust forever due to this man's unthinkable actions. He would pay for all his crimes, and justice would be served.

Nightshade slowly looked back up at the man, glowering at him. Suddenly, she stuck her hand out towards him, clawing the air and shrieking like a madwoman (which was pretty much what she was). At the same time, a sudden explosion of telekineses created a shockwave through the air. The windows in all the nearby buildings shattered into small fragments, the walls shuddered and creaked, and the vigilante flew all the way across the street, crashing into the building on the other side.

The armored man crawled up off the ground, shaking his head to get the ringing out of his ears caused by the sudden shockwave. Atropos began to cross the street, approaching him, and he pulled out his knife. The sight of the blade didn't slow Atropos, and the vigilante didn't quite like the psychotic sparkle in her eyes. He skillfully threw the blade at the approaching killer, the knife embedding itself deep into Nightshade's shoulder. Upon impact, Atropos suddenly stopped moving, cried out in pain, spun on her heel, and fell onto her back. She lay there, dark blood pooling underneath her, clutching her wound, and looking altogether like the innocent victim she wasn't.

She was testing the man's sympathy. Surely he wouldn't let a girl bleed to death in the street by his hands.

The Emerald Knight drew his sword, and approached the figure, limp on the ground. He didn't believe for a moment that she was dead. He hadn't thrown the knife hard enough to spin her around that violenly, and he doubted someone who could blast him across the street without batting an eyelash could be knocked down so easily.

His suspicions proved correct. As he bent down to take his knife, the woman sprang backwards, landing on her feet, without looking any the worse for the wear. Zyke sheathed his knife, and took up a defensive stance.

Atropos flew through the air when he approached, landing a few feet away. She would have grabbed him by the neck and finished him off there, but the knife in her shoulder had interferred with that. Why she hadn't used her other arm, she wasn't sure. She looked at the place where the knife had been in her shoulder, and noticed that the wound was already healed.

Remembering that she was still in the middle of a fight, she looked back at the man. He had put away his weapon, and was now standing defensively. Atropos was thinking about just leaving him there and wandering off to go do something more worthwhile. This guy wasn't a very good fighter. He kinda just stood there and waited for her to attack, which wasn't usually the best idea when fighting someone with telekinesis. The best way to fight someone who could throw a car at you with a flick of her wrist was to throw in as many attacks as possible so that she couldn't get a chance to do anything.

Atropos hoped the man couldn't read minds, and then flicked her wrist. A car from across the street suddenly flew into the air, spinning towards the man.

One word flashed in Zyke's mind as the car whirled toward him. Crap. Zyke dove out of the way, and the car crached through the building behind the spot where he had stood less than a second ago. Pulling off four shruiken, he sent them humming in the other's direction, then charged her. The stars embedded themselves in the woman, but none hit any lethal points. A quick hit to her chin with the hilt of his blade, and she spun around and dropped to the ground. The Emerald Knight placed his booted foot on her kneck and drew back his sword for the kill. . .

The vigilante was pretty fast. He managed to dodge the flying vehicle, throw several sharp objects, and then knock Atropos to the ground with the hilt of his sword. He was now holding her down with his boot on her neck, and about to strike with the blade of his sword. Atropos would have taken a moment to think about the situation, but she figured the man probably wasn't planning on taking a moment before attempting to kill her. She raised her left hand as the man's sword came down towards her head, and the blade stopped in midair. The man was also finding it a struggle to move, some invisible force holding everything still.

The man was strong, and Atropos couldn't hold him still for very long. Quickly, her scissors flew from her boot into her right hand, and with a flick of her left hand, she tossed the man off of her. He tumbled to the ground, his muscles aching from pushing against the force of Atropos' telekinesis. Nightshade picked the shurikens out of her flesh, tossing them aside, and then brandished her scissors. The man quickly got back to his feet, swinging his sword at Atropos. She reached out and caught the blade between the two blades of her shears. The swordsman drew back his blade, and readied another strike. In but a blink of an eye, some dark black substance oozed from Atropos' right hand, covering the scissors. The black matter formed a shell over the shears, which extended the length of them by three feet.

Atropos, now holding a pitch black sword, parried another blow from the man. The black matter had hardened like steel, and sparks flew as the vigilante's blade crashed into it. Another burst of telekinesis threw the man to the ground, and Atropos jumped into the air with her sword, ready to bring the sharp point down upon her assailant.

As the black blade was aimed at him, Zyke spun himself around on the ground, knocking his assailant's legs out from under her. A quick back handspring placed him back on his feet, and he grabbed the odd woman by the collar. He threw he backwards, and she seemed lighter than she should have been, as she flew backwards and upwards almost twenty stories, land on a small decorative ledge. A few quick placements of his grapple hook, and Zyke was on the ledge along with her. The black matter had dissolved from her shears, and she called more up to transform them into a scythe. Zyke's acute sense of balance kept him upright on the ledge as he forced the woman backwards. Suddenly she stopped and put a hand to her ear. Off in the distance, Zyke heard sirens. Finally, the police were on the way. Caught off gaurd, Zyke winced as the scythe sliced a shallow cut across his cheek. It would heal, but it hurt more than it should have. Zyke spat out an ugly curse, then faced the woman again.

Atropos balanced on the ledge, swinging the black scythe like a maniac at the vigilante. He managed to dodge most of the attacks simply by standing just out of range. Atropos suddenly caught a sound on the air, and she put her hand to her ear to hear it better. Indeed, off in the distance, she could hear the sound of police sirens approaching. For some strange reason, the police seemed to follow her wherever she went. You'd think they would have figured it out by now. The vigilante heard the sirens too, and for a moment put his guard down. Atropos reached out with her scythe, and managed to nick his cheek with the tip of the blade.

The swordsman cursed and backed up a step. Atropos cackled and spun on her heel, a foolish movement on the narrow ledge. The vigilante quickly stepped forward and pushed Atropos off, while she was balancing on only one foot. Atropos found herself once again falling towards the ground. Below, several police cars were pulling onto the street. Nightshade gathered to herself a large amount of psychokinetic force, pulling it around her and flipping herself over to face the ground. She aimed the psychokinetic force at the ground directly beneath her, which was currently occupied by a police car. The vehicle suddenly imploded, the invisible force crushing it like a soda can. For a brief moment, Atropos felt herself pause in midair above the vehicle, before she dropped down to the scrap metal police cruiser.

The vigilante quietly glided down to the ground. Atropos stood up on the crushed vehicle, and found herself surrounded by several other police cars. The police were standing near their vehicles, guns out and ready. A shockwave blew out all the windows, and knocked the men to the ground, and suddenly Atropos was gone.

Ten yards up in the air, Atropos was now holding every one of the policemen's pistols, extra limbs of black matter having grown from her back to carry the ones she couldn't fit in her two hands, and as she dropped back down she began to fire the semi-automatic weapons at the men below. She hardly ever used firearms and had horrible aim, but the wave of gunfire was enough to force the police to find cover. She landed feet first on the asphalt, psychokinesis absorbing the shock. The vigilante tackled her, knocking her down and causing her to drop all the pistols. She threw him into a wall with a burst of shock, and got back to her feet.

To avoid the policemen, she quickly flew into the third story window of the closest building. Her shears were back in her boot, and she was holding a black longsword in either hand.

OoC: Sorry on the delay.

BiC: Zyke launched himself via grappling hook up to the third story. He stood face to face with the other combatant. As he rushed her, she brought the two longswords down vertically. Stopping them with the palms of his hands, Zyke thanked his protective gloves, the headbutted the woman. She flew out a nearby windo, and landed on the skid of a police helicopter. A dark matter tentacle formed around her hand, and flung the piolot out of the vehicle. SHe then sent it into a steep climb, spinning erratically. The Emerald Knight followed as fast as he could, but just managed to lose her when an explosin nearby betrayed her landing zone, 500 stories up, on a derelict building's rooftop.

The vigilante quickly followed Atropos up into the building, and as he ran towards her she attacked him with her black swords. He caught the blades in his gloved hands, and slammed his head into hers, sending her flying out the window. Shards of shattered glass slashed her face, but the dark blood that oozed out of the cuts quickly knitted the flesh back together. Atropos quickly caught the skid of a low flying police helicopter, throwing off the balance and causing it to violently rock back and forth. As the pilot fought for control over the helicopter, a tentacle of darkness wrapped around his face, twisting his head around his neck and flinging him out of his seat and into the air.

Atropos climbed up into the helicopter, taking the pilot's seat and grabbing the controls. Of course, she had no idea how to fly the volatile machine, and quickly sent it spinning out of control, climbing dangerously steeply. The flight was abruptly ended when the helicopter collided into the top of the nearest city skyscraper. Atropos threw herself out of the vehicle right as it exploded into flames and shrapnel. She dizzily wandered around on the rooftop for a couple seconds, and then started to wonder what she was doing there.

She noticed some sort of burning wreckage nearby, from what appeared to have been some sort of flying machine, perhaps a helicopter. A large piece of shrapnel clearly read "POLI-" on it, perhaps indicating that the vehicle had once belonged to the police. They were always following her around for some reason. As she was investigating the wreckage, and wondering why her head hurt so much, a man dressed in some sort of black armor and green cape climbed over the ledge and landed on the roof.

"Well hello, who are you?" Atropos asked the man, walking towards him.

The woman asked him who he was. Again. He wondered if it was a trick. He drew his knife and charged the woman. Actual surprise seemed to register on her face, and he supposed it wasn't a trick. She actually seemed to have forgotten him. Well, he had no time to worry about short-term memory loss of criminals. She brought up a dark matter shield, and his knife clanged off of it. She brought up a dark matter broadsword. It was probably too heavy to block with his thinner sword. He was in trouble now.

The man apparently wasn't in the mood for exchanging introductions. Instead, he pulled out a knife and rushed towards her. Surprised, Atropos blocked the blade with a shield formed out of black matter, pushing the knife away. He wasn't a very nice man apparently. Attacking harmless and innocent girls with a knife in the middle of the night. He would have to be stopped. With but a thought in her mind, the shield in her hands transformed into a long broadsword. Atropos slashed the sword at the man a couple of times, causing him to back away. Then, she dropped the sword and started running away.

Nightshade suddenly tripped when she reached the edge of the building, falling over the ledge. It took her a couple of minutes to realize she was falling. "Wait, what?" she said to herself. She hadn't been aware that she was even on top of a building. How in the world did she get way up there? Now she was falling down, the distant ground quickly approaching. The world spun around her as she fell uncontrollably, turning head over heels on the way down. One of her boots flew off as she fell, along with her cap.

Coming to her senses, she used telekinesis to stabilize her fall. She gathered the force of her mind around her, pressurizing the air beneath her, slowing her fall and decreasing her terminal velocity significantly. Getting an interesting idea, she tried to use psychokinesis to get the air to flow around her. She managed to fly a good ten meters away from the building she was falling off of. Then, when she was about to hit the ground, she was able to slow down her descent even more.

The collision with the ground, while not harmful, was still rather shocking. The gathered forces of psychokinesis and gravity exploded with a thunderous crack and the asphalt fractured under the pressure. Atropos had been safely protected by the bubble of telekinesis around her, and when it popped she landed flat on her back on the dusty road. Getting back to her feet, she shook her head to clear it. Something landed behind her with a loud thud, and she went over to see what it was.

It was her boot. She walked over to it and pulled it onto her foot. A couple seconds later, her hat drifted down and she plucked it out of the air, pulling it over her head. A couple seconds after that, the armored man appeared, wielding a sword and heading towards her. Atropos glanced in his direction and drew her finger through the air towards him. As she did, a pair of vehicles that were parked on the street nearby suddenly lifted themselves up and flew through the air towards him.

The Emerald Knight saw the cars hurtling toward him, and threw his grappling hook up several stories and yanked himself to safety. As the cars crashed through the building behind him, Zyke deployed his glide and rammed the woman. She flew backwards and seemed to stabilize herself without doing anything. She held out her hand and Zyke was suddenly bound in place by an invisble force, and thrown into the building (a large, open office space) where the cars had gone.

The woman walked in, and he used a combination of throwing stars and his hook to bring down a large chunk of building right in front of her. At the same time, a small piece of rubble pinned his leg down. It was probabaly broken.

It took but a glance to move aside the heavy concrete mass that blocked her way. Atropos Belladonna entered the building, sidestepping one of the overturned vehicles to get into the main room. It was a dark, empty, abandoned office space. It didn't take her long to find the man she was chasing. He was lying on the floor, pinned underneath some rubble from the building. Atropos wasn't sure if the man had accidentally pinned himself, or if that had somehow been her doing. The events of the night were all beginning to blend together, her mind was having trouble separating them.

Atropos stood before the pinned man, stopping for a moment to collect her thoughts. What was she doing here? Fighting with this man. Why was she fighting with this man? He had attacked her, multiple times. For what reason did the man attack her? She had murdered several people, and revealed to him her dangerous potential for violence. He was only trying to stop a serial killer, to get a deadly murderer off the streets of the city. The question, when it came down to it, was why did she kill those people?

"Why not...?" she wondered out loud. "Killing, kill, murder, death. Destruction, destroy, tear and rip apart. I do it because I want to. I like to. I do it because I can..." she whispered to herself, working out the mess of thoughts running through her head. The vigilante struggled under the heavy chunk of stone that had landed on his leg, frantically trying to get away from this clearly demented woman.

"What do I get from killing, from destroying? Pleasure? What do I lose? What are the downsides, the faults, the reasoning against? Surely nothing can net only positive gains, something must be lost," she continued ranting to herself, slowly approaching the man. "I lose what I destroy. Why do other people not kill, or destroy? Are they too weak? To scared to get in trouble? There must be more than that..." She stood over the armored vigilante, who was trying to push away the debris he was stuck underneath. Atropos knelt down next to him, and continued to speak.

"Right and wrong. Wrong and right," she said, raising her voice. "Is there such a thing? Who decides what is the right thing and what is not allowed? God? Righteousness? Justice? Must we all live up to some imaginary ideal?" The man finally freed himself from the rubble, and quickly got himself up on his good leg. A quick flick of his grappling hook and he was on his way to the other side of the room. On his way there he flicked out his knife, and it stuck in Atropos' throat.

Pulling the knife out, Atropos got back to her feet. "Good and evil. Am I evil? I can't say that I'm innocent, I'll give you that much," she rasped. After spitting out a mouthful of dark blood, the wound in her neck closed itself up. Raising her arms, the room began to shudder and shake. "Is this evil?" she whispered. Delirious, she began to tear apart the room with both of them still inside it. Pieces of the ceiling began to fall down, the floor started to cave in, walls collapsed. "Is this evil?" she asked, louder this time.

A burst of telekinesis sent her flying across the shaking room. Tentacles of black matter appeared spontaneously, dozens of them, all attached somehow to Atropos' body. The tentacles flailed about, grabbing, throwing, and tearing at everything. Three of the wild bands of the black substance wrapped around the injured vigilante, and began smashing him against the walls and floor. "IS THIS EVIL?" Atropos began to scream. The shaking of the room increased until the whole building was rocking and shuddering, creaking and cracking. Windows several stories up began to shatter, the ceiling began to come down on them in torrents, and the floor finally gave way, dropping them into the basement level.

Nightshade hit the floor, disoriented. Ropes of black matter that were once lively and active wilted and began to melt into a thick and sticky liquid. The man was nowhere to be found, likely buried underneath all the debris. Around her the building continued to destroy itself, shaking dangerously. What was she doing here? Killing. Destroying.

Something wasn't right. Atropos looked around her, the color in her eyes fading from red and dimming to a light gray, hinted with indigo. Something was wrong. The past few hours were hazy in her mind. Memories came to her which didn't feel like her own. She had to get out, escape from this prison, but she couldn't move. Locked in place, both mentally and physically.

Finally she gathered her strength, enough to move. Crawling over chunks of concrete, slabs of drywall, and lengths of rebar she was able to make it back to the ground level of the building. From there, it was only a short dash until she was on the street outside. The asphalt was covered in rubble and glass, which had fallen from the higher stories of the building. People were gathering to watch from a safe distance, and the police and paramedics had already arrived. They came after her, and she was too tired to resist.

With one last glance at the building, she saw it finally give up and collapse, burying the Emerald Knight underneath tons of debris. Exhausted from the ordeal, she gave up too, falling unconscious as everything faded to black.