Exhibition Match

Reveille.

The audience wakes me. It is by grace of their mindless thrall of roaring that my lids are rendered ajar. My eyes are sunken, pronounced by the heavy, dark bags clung to chiseled features beneath them. Their frigid blue chambers bleed unspeakable hatred, defined by hues of insidious azure promising memories of nameless horror vastly more dark than the black ringlets surrounding the murderous irises. Their whites are bloodshot, and the brows crowning each are pressed into a hard line.

From the womb of darkness that is this arena's inner chambers I emerge into bathing oceans of sunlight edged by the chanting of thousands. To them, I am no more than a name on a roster- they clamor solely for the promise of carnage. A refreshing sensation. To be cleansed of slate, pardoned of atrocious sins committed in the near past. My record, in this moment, is perhaps spotless enough for me to take pleasure in bloodying it again. Not Carter the Terrible, yet. Simply Carter.

My attention hones itself forward, brandishing the devilish focus of jeweled blue eyes against the figure placed before me upon stretching tiles of white. The man does not appear to possess the usual delusions of grandeur becoming most. He does not announce himself, nor boast feats of a decorated past. He does not belittle me, and he does not seem particularly at ease, as if I am no more than an insect to be whimsically vanquished. This tells me, simply,

That he is dangerous.

Shielding my body from the frozen kiss of the afternoon's winds whipping through the arena is no more than a jet-black hoodie and equally ebony combat fatigues bloused into the lips of combat boots laced with demon's fur. A bold crimson jansport backpack is snugly strapped to my shoulders.

My head turns high to the left, the right, back to center. Ceremonial combat. In days past, I thought highly of it. Now, though, I feel my youth being fruitlessly drained by the sands of time in light of the sport. Glove-clad digita clench into fists. Without a word,

I wait for the show to start.

The breath of Gaia comes to challenge me, whipping currents of air tearing at the integrity of fluttering white tiles vastly extended between my foe and I. In their wake of raw horsepower, the billowing winds telegraph their path. My right fist unclenches, wielding within its palm a pool of whipping electrical bolts, the conduit of alchemical energy.

The innumerable oxygen molecules constituting this mighty freight of wind, in tandem, separate themselves from the atomic bonds they are obligated to keep. This release of tension proves rather ignitious, a thundering explosion consuming the visible setting of the arena. Deconstructed and replaced by oceanic volumes of flame in its purest, quaking white tongues consuming space with voracious swiftness. Concussive force gushes and snaps in directions all and every, rattling the audience and clutching the arena's tilework in a riveting shudder. So too is devoured the area inhabited by Neon White, imprisoned in the billowing tresses of bone-pulverizing impact and incindiary wrath.

This act of great violence is, however, not without constraint. The explosion seems to warp and twist upon itself until it's been funneled into a fine line which tears through the coliseum, splashing those fortunate members of the audience in the ashen blood of the nearby with less luck. The playing field has been split into two pieces, torn asunder with a great, fiery schism. My hair roils in wild fits of whipping and flailing, possessed by the winds of force soon subsiding. Now, and for the second time, an electric pulse roars from my palm. Tendrils of glistening, ebony carbon erupt from one side of the arena to the other, connecting the two massive halves and reeling them together, culminating into a tremor-inducing collision which finds the coliseum whole again.

This, too, finds Neon White and I only inches apart, the space that had existed between us vanquished. He will find that, amidst such anarchy, a tungsten katana with a peculiarly quivering white edge is clutched in my left hand, and on course to cleave through his midsection.

Smoke is heavily composed of carbon, an element most noteworthy for its ability to almost infinitely condense.

I feel the icy grip of the reaper, his frigid clutches creeping along my throat. It is a feeling familiar to me, a sixth sense, one born of a perpetual closeness with death. As the rampantly vibrating edge of my sword sings it's thirsty song, struck as a harp passing through a great storm, I am overcome with the sensation of raw peril. As if frozen in time, I am fully aware that my heart is wrought in overpressure, flooding veins which moments prior housed crimson nectar with gushes of inflamed adrenaline.

Neon White had cleared a perfectly circular space within the fray of devastation, leaving both combatants encircled by thick, sluggish waves of black smoke. With an electrical surge, the molecular structure of the ebony haze is bent to will, masses of carbon colliding and super condensing to form a black wall denser, immeasurably, than steel, shaped into a sphere around us. The foe is left to impact the blockage with spine-punishing throttle where he had been free to maneuver a half-instant prior, and faced with the unhindered katana in my left hand. Where he had sought to bring his heel at my crown now exists a katana's edge curving with nefarious prejudice in an upward crescent with unparalleled motivation to split his skull from mandible to ear.

The offensive. I'm at home, now.