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"You should give that back."

The voice's owner emerged from a connecting side-alley as his words finished. Kamboja was fond of bars on all nights of the week and usually meandered his way to them down back alleys and side streets to avoid running into anyone he knew. When he caught his first glimpse of the woman in the back alley, he had assumed she just another grunt getting into some energy gathering.

But then she had taken it a little too far. Even Kam couldn't watch an innocent man die right now, no matter his own qualms.

So now it was Gehenna that stood there, blocking the alley entrance and trying his best to intimidate the woman into shoving that starseed back where it came from. He took a few steps forward, armor grating on armor as he did. He didn't want to have to fight her.

"Just be a good girl and shove it back in his greasy chest so I can go have a drink, okay?" His brows raised with his question, but his stance was entirely too rigid to be joking.

"Ahh, my mother knows I like the bad girls." Even as he flexed his fingers at his side, balling them into a fist and relaxing them again, his joker's smile surfaced.

"Unfortunately, I'm really not good at taking orders myself. I should just go get that drink, it would be a hell of a lot more comforting than having to bash a pretty girl's face in, but even sleazeballs don't deserve to die in an alley." The smile pursed into a thin line that utterly lacked amusement and he rolled his shoulders in one heavy shrug. His dark eyes fluttered down to the boot she had planted against his throat, then back up to the starseed she was twirling between her fingers. It wouldn't matter if she crushed his throat soon, that body would only survive without a starseed for a short time.

He needed to act. He out-leveled her, out-weighed her, and she didn't even seem to have a weapon. Not that it mattered, he knew they could summon those things at the blink of an eye. Still, if he could act quickly enough..

Without another word he propelled forward. The pick-up was slow, she would no doubt see it coming a mile away, but he reared back his spiked fist and aimed it squarely for her stomach as he closed in. Even if all he got out of the initial attack was knocking her off balance, it was worth it. He needed to get that starseed.

The unfortunate part of making the first move was that it rarely went as one expected. She was fast, shifting away from him with all the time he'd given her during his attempt to close the gap. He slid to a side-ways stop, grimacing and flexing the fingers connected to the offended wrist. He was lucky that he was covered pretty thoroughly with armor, though it made him a little more careless than he would have been otherwise. It was a flaw he accepted.

"Of course not," he let the grimace fade as he turned to face her once more. A smile took its place instead, surfacing as she studied her again. The assault had given him a little information, as did her current stance. She was quick on her feet and fought with her fists - he could respect that. He rolled his shoulder forward and bent at his knees this time, turning the pauldron on his left shoulder to face her. "You couldn't handle my best, sweetcheeks."

His eyes followed her hand as she stuff the starseed down the front of her corset. One, thick brow raised as the smile turned to a smirk and his eyes scoped out his target a little longer than he needed to. "Are you asking me to rip your clothes off?" His eyes rose back to her red ones, joker's smirk in place. "I'm flattered."

He shifted into motion again, but this time he didn't pull back a fist. He ran at her with the angle, aiming to bash right into her with the armored shoulder and throw her off balance. He was useless unless he could get into arm's length, but he didn't want to give her the advantage of the first blow. He needed her off balance, off of those quick little feet.

Gehenna had no time to quip back at her, focused as he was in his headlong dive at the lieutenant. Forethought was not really his forte - but fighting certainly was. Though he lacked the discipline and stance of a formal style, he made up for it with with a scrapper's quick reaction time. As he closed the distance, he kept his eyes trained on his target, and was prepared for the leg she pulled back to swing at him once her body shifted its weight to compensate.

The Squire brought his right arm parallel to the ground, letting her boot slam into the metal gauntlet on its way up. Before it was repelled back by the impact, he caught it with his left hand and used both to solidify his grip on her calf. He couldn't stop the momentum of a full-fledged tackle all at once, which meant losing the force all together and staggering, or taking her down with the ship. He was always prepared to choose the unexpected. He committed to his tackle, twisting his body as he went down. The course set him to land on his back, while shifting her weight to the side so that she swung in a hard arc toward the wall of the alley. With any luck, she'd knock a few marbles loose against the old bricks.

Unfortunately, the motion caused him to lose his grip on her leg and he was distracted as he impacted with the ground, grinding to a sickening halt with the sound of grating metal on asphalt. The high pitched shrill made him wince, but his eyes sought her out as soon he had his wits about him again. He was pushing himself back up with his elbows and fighting through the wind that had been expelled from his lungs, looking for her where he hoped she was also splayed on the ground in disarray.

Gehenna pulled himself up onto his knees just in time to see her turn toward the seedless body -

"DON'T!"

A hand reached out in vain, as if he could stop her, but the sight of the blood spray and the sickening squelch told him it had simply been wishful thinking. The hand fell from where it had been outstretched, slamming into the gritty floor of the alley in a fist, but he did not speak. He drug himself up onto his feet slowly, letting her words fall over him, mixed with the background noise of her scraping her boot on the brick. He watched her, triumphant and bloodthirsty, from a stony face. Then he looked down to his own right hand, weighing some unheard decision in his mind.

The spikes clicked down over the knuckles with an audible 'c***k', though nothing outwardly changed. For Gehenna, his entire vision began to bleed red.

She earned his attention in the same moment that he fell into a pointed march, one that quickly escalated into a mad dash. With each step, his mouth grew into a deeper snarl, until a low growl started to form in his throat. She could stand and face him, or she could run, but those wild eyes were trained on her like she was the only thing that existed. Nothing mattered except connecting his fist to the figure draped in the red of his rage and as he closed in on her for the third time that night, he pulled his fist back, down and low. If she failed to block, the berserker would use the opening to begin a torrent of throws at any spare body part he could reach.

Arm's length might have been right where Cinnabar wanted Gehenna, but it was also the place that he wanted her. Up close and personal, where all of her was vulnerable and within bashing distance.

Somewhere inside of his rage, he registered the punch to his face, albeit a fraction too late. He jerked his head to the side and caught it with a blow to his strong jaw, which ultimately caused it to jerk even harder to the side from impact. If he felt it, though, he didn't show it. The force slowed him down a fraction, but only seemed to enrage him more. He faced her full on now, wild-eyed and furious. There were no sweet quips left on his lips, it had all been lost beneath the red sea that consumed him. This man was barely Gehenna at all.

As one arm swung hard at her side, aiming for a crippling kidney shot, his other hand was pulling back to swing again - probably for her face.

Every time the lieutenant traded blows with him, the rage swelled stronger and stronger. Fists connected with skin, armor, plates - every point of pressure, ever ring of metal, it all drove him forward like the beat of a war drum. The red sea had bathed everything in a morbid blood bath before he'd ever drawn it and the sound of his own heartbeat was pounding deep in his ears, drowning out her curses as if she had never uttered them at all.

The knee she jerked up collided with the plate hanging from his belt, connecting with it and driving it hard against the softer areas. Yet even that didn't fell the man when it should have, instead that pain was channeled back into his rage as more fuel for the wild fire. He swung a fist out above the opposite leg she had lifted, aiming again for the soft middle of her torso. He leered at her as he did, gritting his teeth so hard that the muscles in his jaw bulged.

Even before that fist connected, he was reaching with a free hand right for her throat. The Squire used the momentum of the punch to throw his weight against her, then clamped his hand down around her soft skin. Back he threw her, pinned beneath himself and a wall to stop the struggling limbs that continued to beat at him every time he threw a punch. His hand squeezed, tighter and tighter, as dead eyes stared down into her face.

He didn't notice the way the red was beginning to seep around the edges, not yet, but he would. It was a race against his own fury.