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--Locker room, prior to the match.--

Deitric took a long sip from the plastic bottle of Name Brand (tm) water he had, sitting stooped on a bench with his elbows on his knees. Behind him, the TV buzzed idly. In his solitary concentration, only smatterings of the coverage reached his mind, fragments of sentences that passed through his hearing and didn't seem to touch him. Idly, his hands worked away, taping around, over and under his knuckles in a paper-thin layer of athletic tape.

"In an upset, champion Deitric Jocasta..

...set to fight fellow finalist..

..Omi Barsait..

..Most controversial match-up of Round One.."

The warrior stood up slowly, tilting his head to the left and right to shift his black hair from the front of the shoulders to the back, unrolling his headband to tie it in proper bandanna-style over the top of his head. He slipped on his fingerless gloves over his hands, feeling the black clothe fit snugly over his hands, letting his fingers bend and splay without hindrance. He had everything else in order.

"No win-loss predictions at this time.."

His hand reached out and jammed his finger into the power button, the screen flashing to blank darkness while the door shut behind the GTB champion. He turned to his right and began to head towards the arena.

--Now.--

Deitric vaulted over the low wall that separated the ground-level locker rooms and coliseum facilities from the fighting area, landing with a deadened thud of leather boots on sand. Sand; that was a bit of a change from the previous set-up. When the crowd saw the dark-skinned tribesman, they immediately let loose a tumultuous roar, vague chants of his name hidden in the overwash of voices. Boos, chants, jeers, cheers, it didn't matter - they all melded together into one overwhelming storm of noise, rocking the foundations around them. His entrance was never that flashy - he only walked in by whatever happened to be the best means available to him. It was better to save the entertainment for the fight, after all.

The warrior made his way towards the center of the ring, raising a hand up to the cheering crowd without breaking his typical calm-before-the-storm look of stoicism. He let his hand drop as the crowd began to abate as they waited for the other contender; the second finalist from the previous year.

Deitric hadn't expected to fight the man so early in the competition, given their previous meeting, but that was the luck of the draw. His turquoise eyes stared out across the pit of sand at the other entrance, waiting for his fated opponent to appear. It was a look as telling as stone - impossible to fathom what could have been going on in the man's mind. One thing was clear: he intended to defend his title and keep hold of it.

The tribesman didn't budge an inch from his metaphorical line in the sand. The summer wind tugged at stray strands of hair and nipped at the sleeves of his leather jacket. He barely gave a response when Omi appeared; just an inclination of his head in respect, no emotion present on his face. He didn't appear cold hearted, however, merely calm. Relaxed, even.

When Barsait finally came to a stop in front of Deitric, the differences became apparent. They were both lean, and were built in some manner or fashion as one might expect from a fighter, but the black-haired brave towered over his fellow finalist by several inches, and the depth and thickness of his musculature - even beneath his clothing - made it apparent that he outweighed the two. A guess would have put him at just somewhere over 220; solidly athletic and stoutly built, but without the girth and undue mass of some of the roaming monstrosities found on Gaia. Balanced and well rounded, while favoring physical strength.

The Khasmin man regarded Omi coolly, without any hint of ire or aggression. But the air around the two men seemed to warp and twist with the heat of the fight to come, as if the sunlight blasting the sands of the arena was creating a mirage around them. Deitric's blue-white eyes were boring down at his opponent intently, seemingly glowing and alive with an unseen energy. Like Omi, the leather and denim clad tribesman held respect for his opponent, and found the words and actions of braggarts to have no place in the ring.

"And luck be upon you, Omi Barsait - should we fight with the same agreements in place as before, to continue the tradition?" the tribesman's offered, his voice contrasting with Omi's; smooth and deep, as if the low winter winds spoke through him. While he made the offer respectfully, and considered Omi as honorable an opponent as he had ever faced, he wasn't naive - if the man sought combat while he spoke, Deitric was more than prepared, though one might never tell with his hands at his sides and his stance seemingly loose to match his relaxed features.

His head canted to the side slightly as he spoke, a gesture not entirely out of place for a hawk. It'd be a curious thing; Omi's response. One would just have to see what it would be.

Deitric nodded in the agreement, ignoring some of the boos rising in the crowd. There hadn't been any boos the last time the two men had faced off with the same rules in place, but people were stubborn in their ways and wants, easily forgetting that they'd enjoyed the previous spectacle.

While Omi seemed to prepare, the long-haired tribesman did the same. He reached down, pulling one tomahawk from his belt. He gave the axehead a tap with his index finger before hurling the weapon off to the side. Unlike his fellow finalist, he rarely had any manner of dramatic witticisms to present, and instead opted for silence while Barsait spoke.

THUNK--

--THUNK

The second tomahawk shortly followed, each one finding a mark in the inner wall of the coliseum floor. And there the weapons would stay for the duration of the bout. Afterward, he dusted his hands together, and didn't speak another word. The champion looked toward his opponent when the man finished speaking and offered the slightest of nods to indicate he had heard the man's words, if nothing else - once a fight started, it was rare to ever hear more than one or two words from the brave's lips.

Deitric slid his left foot back, scraping away the loose sand with the heel of his boot as his body turned to offer his right side forward a little more than his left. His upper-body bent forward at the waist, lowering him down to a little below Omi's height, his hands up in a loose guard with unclenched hands. Knees bent, and elbows neither tucked in nor bowed out, it was an odd mixture of striking and grappling potential, and while it brought him a little closer to the ground, it didn't diminish his size in the least.

The crowd's garbled, mingled cries were indiscernible, but the rumbling sentiment beneath the cacophony was clear enough.



And that was the intent.

Both of the men took a stance, and Deitric suddenly shot forward in a burst of motion, crossing the distance between them in barely three steps of his long legs, keeping his upper body lowered and his hands up as combat range became imminent. Like most heavy-weights, he could move forward across short distances with amazing speed with a push from his legs, but he couldn't actually maintain that speed for long periods of time, especially in that stance.

Then again, he didn't need to - the tribesman was pushing straight for Omi, and it looked as if he was aiming to barrel right into the man. With his shift in stance, it offered more than just a possible body-check or punch - if he so pleased, Deitric could "shoot" and get a hold of his opponent's legs to take him down. At the moment, it seemed as though all modes of attack were open - but the tribal warrior had a good record of running headlong into men and bowling them over during combat, and would do so here if Omi allowed him. But he didn't expect that.

So then what did expect?

If he was conscious after the match, the brave would realize that a spin was pretty low on the list of things he had thought Omi might have done in the opening seconds of their fight. Not because it wasn't Barsait's style, or beyond the man - he liked to throw elbows, knees, and kicks, so a spin could work just fine - just that the situation at hand didn't seem like the one for such a maneuver. Spinning was a flashy move, no matter how fast you did it, and it took your eyes off your opponent, even if only for a tenth of a second.

Most people capitalized on it; Deitric didn't. That was because his move wasn't directly working off the spin; it was just in tandem with it, as they'd chosen to make their moves at the same time. He wasn't that quick on the draw, most certainly not when it came to a speed comparison between the two warriors. He wasn't reacting to the spin, he was acting with it, making a move he'd already decided upon that would set the two men on an inevitable collision course. Two actions happening independently, coming to a head in just split seconds.

Without pause, the warrior shifted his weight up hard, turning his swooping charge into an airborne leap at the last second, right at the same time Omi was going into his whirlwind spinning elbow. The dark-skinned brave knew in his subconscious that his opponent was fast, faster than he was - whatever Barsait had in store for him was going to work on some level or another. Even if he had the superhuman mental acuity to think out a new plan and change his movements then and there, he wouldn't have done it. But that was where the two men had common lines of thinking; sometimes you had to take a bit of pain in order to dish it back out. Whatever the other finalist had in store for him, Deitric would just have to take in order to deal something back.

Thu-thu-THWACK--

There was a double-bass drum-roll of bodies and body-parts smashing as Omi's elbow smashed flush into Deitric's body just above the right hip-bone. The first beat of the rhythm had barely struck when the second and third would come in, the beat of combat nearly running over itself in a feverish haste of blows and crashes.

Omi's elbow strike had struck nearly perfectly, perhaps a bit on the broader "flat" side of the elbow nearer the tricep, but nonetheless it had been jammed right into the tribesman's side. Painful, no matter how you looked at it. It didn't seem to slow him down though, but Barsait wouldn't get to have any time to wonder what sort of armor he was wearing under his leathers - and he was wearing something under there. Something that was enough to pad the blow his opponent had just delivered.

In the same ephemeral slipstream of time, the champion's knees had struck and clamped onto Omi's waist at the stomach and small of the back, his right leg beneath the other fighter's right arm, which was jammed into the long-haired brave's side. His right hand was on Omi's shoulder, not out of planning, but the human reaction to going airborne and need for balance or control. That collision in itself might have been enough to buckle or hurt Deitric's opponent, but he was never one to leave a moment un-capitalized upon; the leap and bodily collision had merely been the build up for the attack.

The third beat - hopefully uninterrupted - was Deitric's left fist, which had been set back the entire time in a south-paw stance until the leap, now came crashing down, aiming to slam into the back or side of Omi's head with steel-shod knuckles with as much weight and force behind it as he could draw upon from his charging jump. If the previous 'beats' had been bass drums, they had crescendo'd into a resounding cymbal crash, one of the tribal man's fist and Omi's skull. Normally, such a move was common to do with a tomahawk - leaping onto an opponent and smashing their skull into pieces while they were off-balance.

With any luck, the combination of overbearing weight and momentum smashing into Omi, with a heavy-handed punch to the head to top it off, would be enough to collapse the warrior beneath Deitric, leaving him in an arguably dire position. The tribesman hadn't even seen the kick that Omi had thrown - but now, there were bigger things for the challenger to deal with than hoping to kick out an ankle or shin. He had the full brunt of the bright eyed, black haired prizefighter trying to bear him to the ground.

Omi was right--

--they had changed.

Deitric had changed.

Omi could move his head away a bit, but they were on their way down, and even so, Deitric's reach was inescapable at that range - the smaller Barsait might get to retaliate, but he wasn't going to get away from the hammer when it fell. Not with the Khasmin man right ontop of him.

There was a crack of metal-shod bone striking bone as Deitric's left fist crashed into Omi's skull like a hammer without any regard for the immediate retaliation the fellow finalist had made - just as with the initial elbow, the tribesman hadn't the time to be worry about the ifs that could come from any moment of battle. Some things were simply bound to happen, one way or another.

The larger tribesman had succeeded in his leaping attack, both crashing and locking onto Omi, while managing to rain down his first strike successfully. The more lithe Barsait's own left lashed out to retaliate barely a split second after the brave's own punch connected, but the response was less severe than Deitric's own attack.

Both of the men's positioning contributed to the potential success or failure of the blow. The champion had his knees clamped to Omi's waist, and was inevitably higher up than the smaller of the two finalists, with his opponent's head just reaching up to the top of the tribesman's broad chest. Omi's right elbow was buried into Deitric's flank, while his shoulder was being pressed against by the tribesman's hand while the larger fighter was latched onto Omi's right side. Reaching across one's chest, combined with having no real torque, made for a hard attack. But both of them had no doubt been in rough positions before - attacks couldn't always be perfect.

The upward swung fist clicked painfully against the bottom right side of Deitric's neck and into part of his collarbone, the edges and ridges of the pauldron scrapping off skin and drawing pricks and dribbles of blood almost immediately. Omi had hit lower than he probably anticipated, but he had managed to strike the carotid artery in the side of the tribesman's neck, and briefly clip the breathing passage.

That was, without a doubt, more than a little painful as small iotas of blackness played along the edges of his vision while his body worked feverishly to continue pumping blood to the brain in response to the momentary pressure put onto the neck in question. It wasn't severe damage, but that didn't mean it wasn't painful, it hurt more than it looked. He hadn't struck the actual throat with enough force to damage it or disrupt his opponent's breathing, but Omi had done something - there was a catch in Deitric's breathing as it became husky and rough, eliciting a rattling "kaff, kaff, kaff" sound when he exhaled the next few times.

Would anyone in the crowd see that, though? Unlikely. In the twisted sense of time and surroundings that a warrior had during battle, it was likely that the sound of their breathing in the thunderous roar of all other sounds was just background noise, and the crowd would be hard pressed to know that Omi had just come inches from striking a very debilitating blow against the defending champion. While it hadn't struck the intended mark, it had still done damage - blood would pain the side of the brave's neck before long, for all the crowd to see.

But right now, the fighters had something bigger at hand. Omi's gamble in hoping to strike Deitric's throat and force a change in position hadn't paid out a large enough reward - the tribesman wasn't trying to put distance between them. They were going groundside.

A dull, heavy thud sounded when the duo hit the ground. Omi would have landed on his left side, while Deitric would be mounted ontop of him in a half-upright position, sitting just below his rib-cage with his right hand clamped and pushing down on Omi's right shoulder. If the pale-eyed tribesman had any hesitation in taking advantage of their ground position, he didn't show it in the least; his face grimly set and chillingly calm. No give, no offer of surrender.

THOCK THOCK THOCK THOCK--

Keeping Omi set down with his weight and the press of his right hand, the stoutly built, Khasmin man's arm was going to start pumping down hard, swift blows to the other man's head almost immediately. The arm cocked back and shot down, pumping away almost like a jack-hammer.

With Deitric's build, punches from the top position were brutally powerful, with enough force to bounce his competitor's skull right off the ground. And he didn't throw just one. The tribesman was throwing punches in bunches, and he was intent to rain down a serious dose of pain on his fellow finalist.

If everything went according to plan, Omi was going to be in one hell of a position - one that Deitric wasn't intent on letting him out of. Any man would be hard pressed to find an escape route while under a barrage of punches from someone of the champion's size. The black-haired brave didn't show any signs of slowing down, either - despite the fact he was still making a hollow "kaff" with each exhalation, he refused to let the burning pain that reached from his neck across his throat and shoulder stop him. All he needed to do to end the fight was punch, punch, punch.

Could Omi stay conscious long enough to manage an escape?

The dark-skinned warrior was doing everything in his power to make sure he couldn't.

The crowd rose up as one in a oceanic wave of people, shouting and crying out until their voices went hoarse. The fight had been the most-discussed pairing of the first round, possibly of the entire tournament. Two former finalists, renewing their former restrictions to fight each other. The crowd didn't know who was at a loss, but to see one of them, either of them come out into a dominant position was reason enough to cheer.

In the sand, Deitric's left fist had been pounding away at Omi. To a spectator, it was simply what a fighter did. To an observant fighter, it was telling just how much the tribesman respected Omi's abilities in combat that he would go to such lengths to force his enemy into a disadvantaged position, the way he took abrupt gambles and applied them with such straightforward aggression. In other fights, the warrior had rarely ever came out swinging with so much force and raw aggression. The only comparable time was his fight with the Heaven or Hell Eliminator, Gamma, who had been hired with the specific intent of ruining Deitric's fighting ability prior to one of the rounds.

It was because of that knowledge of Omi's prowess that his opponent had taken such measures to disadvantage him by putting him on the ground. In many ways, the two men were markedly similar - they strove for some measure of 'balance', cleverness, and a liberal application of "impromptu planning." But they were still two very different animals; Deitric opted for a greater focus on strength and power, while Omi opted for speed and agility. It was that difference that made Omi dangerous for Deitric, and Deitric a dangerous foe for Omi.

Each time he drew back to punch, the chestnut skinned warrior could feel a tingling just beneath his skin, a prickling sensation biting at the bit to be free. In his position, he could do to Omi what he did to Gamma - force out all his energy into one or two blows, and crack he man's skull like an egg. It could end the match in one blow--

--but that, in the tribesman's eyes, would be cheating. Foul play. A man was only as good as his word, and he had proffered the agreement in the first place. The only way he would break that, would be if Omi did so first; and both the men held their personal pride as respectable fighters in too high a regard to do such a thing.

Fist cocked to throw another blow, he watched Omi's head rebound off the ground like a basketball before..

"BLEH"

..The prone man spat something out of his mouth at the tribesman's face. The warrior's head turned to the left in a split-second recoil of surprise and his eyes instinctively squinted shut. There was no way to dodge the sand, something he hadn't even seen coming. The much splattered over the right side of his face like wet cement. Some sloughed off, but enough remained caked on his face that his right eye was forced to stay closed for now. Opening it would only irritate it, so for now he was effectively going for the Pirate look.

CHOMP

"Hrrrrgh!"

And then Omi's teeth sank into the top of the index, middle, and ring fingers of the Khasmin man's right hand. The bottom and literal tips of his fingers were safe as he grasped the man's shoulders, but the smaller fighter's top row of teeth did a good job of outright shredding the sensitive flesh to ribbons and probably doing some heavy damage to the nails ontop of it.

Deitric was a tough man, all things considered. Since their previous bout, he had about dozen new scars, one especially noticeable just under his left eye where a chunk of stone had been used to try and gouge out his eye. But not even he could just blank out that sort of pain. It wasn't even worth trying - the fingertips were too sensitive, and the pain was too much. He couldn't ignore it, but pain was also good for something, as Omi was showing: it was an excellent fuel for a fighter. Pain got the adrenaline flooding into one's bloodstream, get the blood rushing into your ears and make a man see red.

Spitting sand and trying to shred up his fingers - Omi was really pushing the brave's buttons. At least by biting his fingers, the tricky fighter had given Deitric a clear idea of where his head was so he could get a taste of the man's immediate reaction to "where-did-the-tops-of-my-fingers-go?" and "make-it-stop-NOW."

He had paused at the sand at instinct, but the first instincts when it came to pain were fight, or flight. For the champion, the choice was obvious: He was going to fight whatever hurt him and try to defend himself as best as possible.

After Omi bit into Deitric's fingers - and maybe sought to dig a little deeper while his arm protected him - he was going to feel the larger man's left fist come crashing down again, this time punching with the intent to literally force Omi's toothed grip from his fingers. It'd probably damage the fingers even more, but he wasn't thinking about that; the brave's only thoughts were that he needed to get his fingers out from under Barsait's teeth.

Luckily, he didn't need to see Omi (though, from his vantage point, his left eye could still see a little) to punch him in the head, especially when the pain was painting a pretty good idea of where his head would be. If the man beneath him managed to block, hopefully Deitric's position and power would be enough to force the guard to crash into the man's head and still have the desired effect.

THOCK

Assuming that worked (or even if it didn't), the defending champion would do the only thing he could. And that was continue to sling power punches down at Omi as best he could. He was aiming for a KO (and get him away from the shredded hand, if he was still gnawing away at it) more than ever now.



Guard? What he could see of the guard, he didn't give a damn about it. His left arm was working double time, driving down meteoric punches as fast and hard as he could manage. Omi bucked and twisted beneath him to try and escape but as long as the fighter's weight was settled ontop of him, he wasn't going anywhere. Let the man guard - or not - if he so desired - Deitric Jocasta was going to keep giving out punches like they were going out of style, aiming to hit his opponent anywhere he could, be it the face, skull, or even the top of the neck.





Out the door, he had outright gone to town - these weren't punches in bunches, they were bunches of punches that were bunched with other bunches of punches. The crowd gave an uproarious cry as the jack-hammer of an arm tried to crash down again and again. Omi had torn away more than just first blood (and quite a bit of Deitric's middle finger, moreso than the others), but could he survive the continued, roaring barrage of punches his head was being put under? The man was tough, but steel shod knuckles were tough too, and Omi Barsait's opponent wasn't going to give him an inch of give or quarter.

Omi might have stopped the barrage, but by grabbing and pulling on Deitric's arm, the man was entering a contest of strength. He might have held an initial advantage, but it wouldn't take long at all for the larger, more muscular of the two fighters to start forcefully retracting his arm, while curling his fingers around part of the pauldron to keep the arm from escaping his own pull. He wasn't pulling back to escape and punch, however - in the long run, he'd be putting Omi's arm across his own throat, and his own left hand out of biting range. But that would come later.

While that had stopped his relentless onslaught of punches, there was something else coming. Omi had turned his face upwards as if he were about to give the long-haired warrior a stare-down; something no fighter in their right mind would have done without reason in Omi's position, given the fact that the brave's right hand could still punch if needed. That tripped a few alarms in the returning champion's mind.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

The Khasmin tribesman wasn't about to get another face full of sand - at least not in his usable eye. When Omi turned his face up, the warrior sucked his head back to his neck and turned it aside so that the sand caught the right side of his face and dirtied his hair. That didn't matter; the right side of his face was already stuck with at least a thin coating of sand, more of the grainy stuff wasn't much of a bother.

While Barsait was spitting sand, thrashing to and fro, and trying to snap his teeth into one of his opponent's hands, Deitric wasn't sitting idly by. While the smaller man couldn't do a great deal in terms of movement, pinned under the stoutly built brave as he was. Not without help, anyways.

And he would get more help than he wanted.

While he was going for the bite, Deitric's semi-mangled hand turned to hook 'round the triceps of Omi's right arm and give a sudden yank to the right, leaning to his left and then to his right subtly to give a surprising amount of force to the push. He hadn't chosen to push because Omi was trying to bite him again; but because he was pushing in concert with Omi's thrashing so that the man would actually overturn and be forced onto his stomach. The idea was to catch him by surprise. If the maneuver didn't, no harm done; both of Omi's arms were trapped in one manner or another: The right trapped directly beneath his opponent, and the left in a mutual tug of war with Deitric's own left.

The man was writhing, throwing himself to the left and right trying to get free from Deitric's weight. When he threw himself to his [Omi's] left, Deitric just yanked and pushed with his right arm, essentially turning Omi's jerking attempts of escape into a roll that put the smaller fighter onto his stomach, with the leather and denim garbed champion sitting somewhere around the upper-middle of his back.

What's more was, with their mutual hold on each other's arms (or, at least, Deitric's grip on the pauldron of the left arm), Omi's left would now be trapped, crossed over his neck and stuck beneath his chin and against his throat. In that position, the brave would apply a steady pull to arm he held while his bloodied right simultaneously slammed down onto the back of crafty Barsait's head to smash his face into the ground before locking his fingers into the man's hair. With any luck, that would help with the whole "choking into submission" idea.

If that occurred, Omi was arguably in a worse position than before - his face being forcefully pressed into the sand to help cut off his breathing, while having his left arm was being used to apply pressure to his neck and effectively choke him out. Deitric's sly opponent might have been able to breathe a minute amount, but it couldn't take too long before he succumbed to the lack of oxygen and blacked out. Especially with the beating his head had taken barely a moment prior.

How would Omi Barsait escape his opponent's machinations? Could he? The sands of time were slipping away, and it looked like the man's number might finally be up for this round.