Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Your have a pretty foul mouth you know that?"

Vrael was not going to sit around and let Krauss yell obscenities at him while he was sprawled on the ground. A dark frown split his handsome features and the tanned businessman glared angrily at Krauss. He rose to his knees, crouched in order to fit within the cylindrical shield that surrounded his hunched form. He had a few words for his identically dressed opponent but was silenced when a large foot was sent crashing against his forcefield and shoving the 'front' of the shield into his face. He managed to cross his arms across his face before he was knocked onto his back and sent into a mad roll across the waves.

Honestly it looked like Krauss tried to skip rocks using his opponent as a rock. Vrael looked like a ragdoll skipping along the water surface but the incoming waves were what stopped him from bouncing even further. The powerful current caught him after his first couple of bounces and dragged him back towards the platform, aided by the current of water Vrael collected to further propel him towards his opponent. Shoving himself skywards using a pillar of water Vrael executed a neat series of somersaults before landing perfectly on his feet, drenched in water.

Streams of water ran down Vraels face but he merely blinked the droplets that collected on his eyelashes away. Violet hues sought out Krauss and when they landed upon his opponents form curled around the katana imbedded into the side of the platform. Adrenaline and an almost painful level of rage tore through Vrael's body as he observed his opponent and tuned into the boos and catcalls of the crowd. The gentleman narrowed his strange eyes and quickly lifted both hands over his head, dragging a large volume of water from the ocean behind him and directing it into a pillar of spiraling force, aimed for the section of the arena Krauss clung to.

The force of the pillar would be fed by the waters immediately surrounding the platform, attempting to force Krauss into the ocean. But Vrael didn't want his opponent to be disqualified. No, he wanted Krauss to be publically humiliated for the singular reason of embarrassing Vrael. His fingers curled into wicked claws and he thrust his arms forward to pile more pressure onto Krauss.

From the depths of the water, Vrael cutlass was collected into the supernatural current after it was lost during Vrael's bounces along the water’s surface. The wicked weapon spun within the thick column of water, collecting speed until it was a ring of sharpened steel that would fall directly onto Krauss. Luckily for Krauss (and Vrael) the cutlass would hit the purple eyed opponent across the edge. It wouldn't kill him but the hilt would definitely disorientate Krauss because of the speed it collected during its travel along the watery road.

"You alright over there? You punk a** b*****d?!"

Yeah, Vrael could take up sailor talk when it suited him.

Eventually, Krausse just thought 'screw this', and let the pressure of the pillar take him into the ocean. He was righteously angry at Vrael's annoying ability to call up a tidal wave in the ocean. It made the fight impossible to win if his opponent could just call up tidal waves that large instantaneously and sweep Krausse off of the platform, along with his opponent being able to call up magical barriers to stop Krausse's blades at whim. Krausse wondered when the rather omniscient judges would slap his opponent across the face. Probably never, for they were fickle men, but he could hope for some relief against the onslaught of water, couldn't he?

As Krausse went into the water, having so valiantly fought against it, the crowd's reaction turned even more sour to Vrael. The man was obviously a poor judge of character, as Krausse was a man of the people. In the first round, he had done much the same, exploiting his opponent's use of dazzling powers against a man who wielded nothing but blades, staves, and fists as cowardly. When Krausse outsmarted Leonard, he had only made the man look like a fool and a weakling to the crowd and Krausse the very image of an every day hero that had nothing but martial skill against the supernatural. Naturally, when people's hero didn't seem to be doing excellently, the people did not agree. Vrael would find even more derogatory insults made towards him, almost like he was the opponent of Muhammad Ali. His plan had backfired, and the irony would have been unbearably funny to Krausse had he figured that Vrael planned to merely attempt to embarrass him and not win by disqualification.

1

The cutlass skidded against nothing, as Krausse was underwater. His legs kicked furiously at the closest boat, merely ten feet away from the platform.

3

Krausse hauled himself on top of the wooden canoe, where the tidal wave was not aimed at him - at least momentarily. Vrael wouldn't risk a disqualification by directly attacking a spectator. The guy on the boat shouted, "Beat him! Beat that pansy fish!" but Krausse barely heard, his eyes narrow and focused like a murderer's, his heart pounding in his throat, his blood running hot and angry, the world just background to his war with Vrael.

5

Krausse's ran to the edge of the canoe and leaped, nearly tipping the boat over in the process. The only thing that stopped it from tipping over was the massively fat four hundred pound spectator that sat in the center, keeping it firmly rooted on the upside.

6

If Vrael didn't intend to disqualify Krausse, he wouldn't hit the warrior with another blast of the tidal wave. If he did, then Krausse would surely not be able to get back into the ring in another four seconds and would lose the tournament in a fashion that would leave him annoyed and the spectators probably angry enough to attack Vrael. Not everyone in the crowd was human and many of them were fighters, but just not good enough to participate in the tournament. Krausse hopefully landed on the platform with the heavy thunk of his full lead foot weight plus the weight of the water he was drenched by.

The crowd cheered.

"Is that all you've ******** got, fishboy?" Krausse yelled as he literally ripped off his dress vest and dress shirt, the delicate silk being especially more when wet. His tan, toned, powerful upper body muscles rippled under their water coat, eliciting loud screams from the females (and some males) in the crowd, human or and otherwise. "Or are you going to do more than cry in fear and throw the river of tears at me?"

As both fighters went down, spectators literally jumped off of their seats to stare into the water. Television crews scrambled to bring underwater camera equipment out of their vehicles to continue showing the battle live to television and Internet viewers Gaia wide - or at least most of them did. Some of them hadn't been smart enough to bring underwater camera equipment.


----


"Garble! Fargblebagle!"

That was pretty much how Krausse sounded underwater as he tried to spit out the sea water he had swallowed when the tidal wave swept him off again and dumped him so unceremoniously into the ocean. But every time he opened his mouth, more water rushed in to fill the void created by the emptied water. After two attempts, he gave up and just swallowed the mouthful of water. The heavy salt content went down his throat harshly and the taste made his eyes water a little bit, as any connoisseur of the rich life would balk emotionally at the taste of sea water.

Then Aquaman himself joined Krausse in being underwater, just as he was going to swim up back to the platform to give the guy even more insults and crowd hate. The count was negated, and it was now an underwater duel - something that, in his incredibly long life, Krausse had probably more experience of than Aquaman. Although Krausse mostly had experience fighting over sized undersea monsters and submarine combat; fighting a humanoid underwater wasn't a specialty of his, although the principles were mostly the same. Just made smaller, right?

If Vrael hoped to rely on using the fact that Krausse lacked gills to breathe the dissolved oxygen content in water, he was in for a sore surprise. A cybernetic brain meant that Krausse's brain was mostly relegated to circuitry instead of synapses, although there were still organic bits here and there that Krausse mostly had for show. The duties of those bits could be relegated to Krausse's cybernetic brain, so Krausse could allow for organic brain death and still function at peak form. After the battle, Krausse could release the cyber-gease that locked away his immense powers and brought him down to something between a human and a robot and regenerate the organic bits of his brain, like he had done after the fight with Leonard. He would need a lot of bacon, though. Organic regeneration requires organic material, after all, and bacon was delicious and contained a lot of protein! It even had some amino acids! Best of all, it was completely offensive to several religions to eat it.

He has the advantage, Krausse thought as he dropped his katana and switched hands on his dagger. He's taken my speed, but he forgot something.

A look of something beyond a predatory hunger spread across Krausse's face, something primitive and vicious that was bone chilling from the crazed, kill-or-be-killed look in Krausse's eye. A grin spread across his face that was beyond a mad hatter's dreams and Krausse's teeth looked sharp enough to scissor flesh from bone like a hungry lion's maw.

I'll die before I lose.

(Thank you Vintrict. I love you bby. heart )

Thurgood opens takes one bottle as he ponders on how the invisible barrier worked, and more importantly, how he could nullify it. Even magical powers are subject to the laws of physics when those powers manifest in the physical world. Thurgood then swallows just a swig of what he thinks is his methanol, and chugs down the other bottle, which he thinks is water. Problem is, Thurgood mixed up the bottles, and just drank about 473 milliliters of methanol: beyond a lethal dose for most people, and at best, it would make Thurgood deathly ill. At worst, death of course. Though this might end up being his saving grace: the methanol will destroy any pathogens in his bloodstream, like those that are causing his fever.

Patience was not necessarily the key to Krausse's plan for victory as much as letting Vrael come to him was. Vrael may have taken Krausse's physical speed for the most part, because Krausse could swim at least half as well as the Aquaman, but Vrael didn't take Krausse's mental speed and reaction times. Being underwater obviously made Vrael confident and maybe a bit overconfident, indicated by the Aquaman's show of his rather impressive swimming speed. Overconfidence and hubris and all forms of overestimation of one's abilities all made the classic error of underestimating the other person's abilities. Krausse may have been a mere human, albeit a mutant one, but he was a damned crafty one and his speed was never to be underestimated; in other words, he could follow Vrael's movements, but he pretended not to be able to. Never reveal all your cards at once, after all. To put on a show, Krausse began "attempting" to follow the bubble trail, although he took enough stealthy glimpses of Vrael to gather that the Aquaman's plan wasn't to use his advantage and instead, grab his cutlass.

What the hell? Krausse wondered if fish boy was retarded or something. You always press your advantage when you have it. Always. Even the retarded gamers that thought themselves the prodigious children of Robert E. Lee because they were good at a few strategy games know that an advantage is to be used until useless.

Then Vrael began to move to the surface and Krausse immediately followed, seeing an advantage to use. He was far closer to the platform than Vrael - in fact, he had fallen just short of a foot of it - and by the time that Vrael had began somersaulting in the air, Krausse was pushing onto the platform quickly, water pouring off of his body. When Vrael landed, Krausse was sprawled on the platform on his stomach, merely an arm's reach away from his opponent.Vrael's trident had been washed near the edge of the platform that Krausse had fallen off by the massive tidal wave, but somehow had miraculously not been washed into the ocean. When Vrael scooped down to grab his trident, an unaware fool, Krausse's arm lunged out like a cobra's head, timed so that his prey's closest ankle would fall victim to Krausse's iron clamp grip, powerful enough to be painful in itself. If Vrael wasn't smart enough to register fear on his face at the same time as surprise, then he would learn to do so in the heartbeat after he felt the one hand. In that heartbeat, Krausse's dagger hand caught sliced through Vrael's achilles heel, a move that would completely cripple one of his legs as well as bring a world of pain and blood upon the ******** YOU!" Krausse screamed, all sense of humanity and decency gone from his voice and replaced with something like a half-starved lion's roar upon being let loose into the arena to feast. He would not be denied his bloodshed, not today!

As Thurgood continues to lean against the side of his Caravan, watching the match, his mind starts to think of ways he could possibly take Vrael down with powers like these. There has to be a way to completely negate all magical powers and limit a fight to just conventional weapons, attacks, and tactics.

Vrael found that Krauss never ceased to surprise him with those lightning quick movements, excellent strength, and incredible speed. He managed to see Vrael and react with enough speed and accuracy to slam his shoe against Vrael's sword hand. Though any other human would have a few broken bones Vrael would only suffer from moderate bruising thanks to the higher durability developed by a species that thrived under tremendous undersea pressure.

The cutlass was indeed retrieved from Vrael but the kick launched the Nautian to the side, moving away from the upwards kick that was aimed to Vrael's 'nutsack'. His right hand was thrown to the side by the kick but his body simply sailed over the platform before landing once more, sliding across the slick wood while his left hand jumped in erratic positions and shapes. The water that covered his opponent, the platform, and filled the ocean leapt as Krauss in the form of liquid tentacles. These watery limbs moved at ridiculously fast speeds, wrapping around Krauss before Vrael even landed on the platform. One of the limbs tossed the trident towards Vrael which he expertly caught in his left hand and twirled in a quick blue blur.

The tentacles wrapped around the handle of the cutlass, the sword-wielding wrist, the bicep and shoulder of that same arm, Krauss's neck, torso, both legs and his remaining arm, were quite strong and solid. Several dozen gallons of water were tightly condensed into the forearm thick watery limbs which were what allowed the limbs to restrain Krauss, thanks to the insight Vrael already possessed on his opponents strength.

Once the high speed tentacles ensnared Krauss, the enraged look-alike would be surprised when he saw the butt of Vrael's six foot long trident already stabbing towards the center of his chest. Vrael strength would the tennis ball sized orb mounted on the butt to seriously bruise Krauss's bones, but the true power came from the explosion of kinetic force that would shatter and break multiple ribs and Krauss's sternum as it crashed against the opponent’s chest. The trident was drawn towards Vrael by one of the free tentacles before it joined more of the continuously forming limbs to restrain the opponent. Vrael's speed was finally shown in full force when he stabbed forward to annihilate his opponent’s ribs.