Ashley’s corpse was being hauled into the Ember clan’s side of the arena. Her split chest unveiled her dead lungs and a bigger gap in between her two breasts. Her face was drenched in her own blood after Cynthia had squeezed the last remaining juices of her heart for her to see. The Ember warriors did not mourn for Ashley’s death, however. Ashley was one of the pompous, pretentious warriors who merely desired an honorable title in order to be in charge. She was no leader-material of the clan and it only bothered the Ember warriors due to her humiliating defeat, especially after letting Cynthia dissect her in front of a live audience.
After seeing this match, the audience was already guessing who was to be the most frenzied and uncontrollable warrior. Yet, the burning flames which they had expected from the oncoming Ember warrior was most dissatisfying. In fact, there were no flames coming out of her eyes at all. No fury. No anger. No desperation. It was almost uncomfortable and pointless to see an Ember warrior walk out into the stadium with no fire in her heart.
Sharon was not bothered by the audience’s silent reaction of frustration. She wished to reveal nothing to her enemy but her golden armor plates and the tight pitch-black textile covering her breasts. Her hair was tied up into a bun, and she was the first pyromancer to appear into the arena with no weapons. Her acrimony and might did not show, but her confidence was on another level. She merely marched straight into the center of the stage, waiting for her cryomancer prey to skedaddle in front of her.
Much like the other pyromancers, Sharon only had light golden plates covering her limbs. The hardened parts were mainly focused toward her knuckles, which virtually declared that she was more of a fist-fighter rather than a quick or heavy blademaster. Just in case the audience was all-too disinterested in her outfit and style, she ignited mighty orange bursts of flame into her hands. She showed that she was more than ready to melt the cold heart of her opponent.
From the other side, Sunna appeared, having a very similar physique to Sharon but with wavy, brunette hair running down her shoulders. Unlike other cryomancers, she had a brown sports bra covering her breasts and bright magenta lips that she grinned with in front of the audience.
But most of all, there was something very unique about Sunna. She did not seem like a cryomancer. Instead, she forged what looked like dirt and sand crumbled up together into a considerable ball of hardened earth out of thin air and slammed it on the ground to briefly show off her strength. Everyone, including Sharon, was bewildered. This was not what anyone had expected. Sharon raised her hand and shot out a spark of ember into the sky to show her confusion and request the judges to pause the match.
The judges appeared on the wide screens and looked at Sharon in disgust.
“What now, young pyromancer?” Judge Tamara spat.
“I demand explanation!” Sharon shouted confidently. “The Frost clan has drafted an outsider into the sacred battlegrounds with no proper notification towards the high council nor the rightful sovereignty of the Ember clan!”
“Anotice, was provided towards the council minutes ago. Cease your complaints of suspicion and weakness and fight to your death!”
Sharon did not like the feeling of this. She had never encountered one who had control over dirt and sand, never mind much experience with a cryomancer controlling a feeble element. Her heart palpitated in the fear of the unknown, but followed the procedures and was willingly tied up on the Exchange scaffold.
Sunna smirked and approached Sharon’s bound body. Like a typical warrior, she began by striking her ear into Sharon’s left breast in order to hear her heart beat inside of her. Despite her confidence as a warrior, Sharon’s heart was already pounding quite fast due to the appearance of Sunna. Sunna laughed enjoyably and rubbed her ear even deeper into the soft flesh. She was almost addicted to Sharon’s heavily pumping heart. The boomy echos of the organ raced within her deep chest as her lungs moved up and down at a quicker rate due to her anger rising from within.
Sunna then climbed on the wires chaining Sharon’s four limbs on the scaffold in order to get a closer look at the structure of Sharon’s thorax. Sharon was quite pathetic in the Exchange. The audience showed distrust in her victory as her heart continuously pounded faster and faster, showing almost no motivation to conceal her instability towards them.
Noticing this, Sunna took a step further and started running her thumbs down the center of Sharon’s bosom and began to utter the parts of her chest.
“So this is the manubrium and the body of your rib cage.. It’s actually quite sturdy.. I might have to use a bit more force than I used to puncture you.. And let me see here.. So that’s where your left lung is.. It’s going to have no use for you after this battle, by the way.. And… Oh, I can actually feel the apex of your heart beating when I push in here..”
Sharon felt extremely distressed as Sunna pushed into the bottom of her left breast very hard and rubbed in her thumb to feel her heart pumping. The part of the organ was bouncing up and down the gaps made in between the 4th and 5th ribs, meaning that there was literally nothing between Sharon’s heart and Sunna’s hand but Sharon’s thin flesh and her pericardium. This angered Sharon very much.
Sunna finished her session of mockery and proceeded towards her side of the scaffold.
Ashley swung again, but this time, Cynthia summoned another ice hammer and putt the Aruval out of Ashley’s hands. The blade flew far away from the two of them, which disarmed her. Ashley wasn’t without weapons, though. Her body itself was a potent compound of flames. Her first fast punch hit Cynthia directly on her cheek, shattering the ice armor surrounding it.
Cynthia still held on. She enforced her fists with ice and backfired, smashing the diamond-like seal on the left side of Ashley’s chin. Ashley’s eye momentarily lost focus at such a direct and firm blow. She lost strength in her legs and fell back-first to the hard ground. Cynthia was now slightly delighted. She saw her enemy become bewildered to the might of the frost, trying her best to keep Cynthia from hitting her again. Ashley was not down yet, but the shock was immense. It was even more powerful than the one she had taken from Cynthia’s hammers. After all, the hidden flaw of Ashley was that she had close to no experience in fighting a cryomancer, especially one who could utilize the cold as well as Cynthia could.
Ashley began to panic. She had not considered this before. She thought that rage and her superior elemental powers of fire would merely overpower and engulf cryomancers, with no relation to their actual strength. She thought that the flames could melt down even the biggest glaciers. The thing she had never understood was that she was only a campfire in the eyes of the experienced such as her own enemy. Although the two did not show much age difference, Cynthia had participated in the tournaments before. She had laid down at least two pyromancers with the strategic use of her powers. Most importantly, she had the some of the strongest willpower of the Frost clan.
Cynthia formed ice hooves and stomped on the ground to flatten Ashley’s limbs. Ashley desperately rolled and dodged the sudden strikes of her superior. She got back on her feet and attempted to retrieve her blade, but at that moment, Cynthia smashed another hardened hammer on Ashley’s bosom, having her fly back 6 feet and gasp in pain of the consolidated impact. The body of her rib cage was severely dented, and she could even feel the harrowing sore coming from within. It hurt tremendously. Her heart was not helping; it continued to pump and thump and hammer onto the center of her broken rib cage. Ashley could not recover her stance. She was lying down back-first again, and this time, she could not erect herself back up again. She panted powerlessly, feeling her heart punish her by ramming itself back and forth on to her skeleton. She had never felt such agony inside her chest. Now the only thing she had in mind was the horror of having Cynthia’s stable hand cling onto her beating heart. She saw how her own teammate had ripped apart Anastasia’s physique. The sight of the scene itself seemed to hurt. She was still having a hard time believing that she was now to be the victim of such tortuous fate.
Cynthia approached Ashley’s helpless body and smirked, exactly in the manner that she was approached by during the Exchange.
“How do you feel, tough girl?” Cynthia began, lowering her body to reduce the distance between the two. “Looks like you won’t be able to see how big my heart is..” Ashley was paralyzed. Cynthia now looked at her as a demon. The source of all her pain to the last of her defeated breath, the reaper of her core, the harbinger of the torment involved in the heart removal.
“No..,” Ashley whispered, barely able to take a breath without provoking pain in chest. “No..!”
“You were pretty easy-off for a pyromancer your size,” Cynthia said, as she now knelt down top of Ashley. “Let me see.. May I expose you again?”
Without a second thought, Cynthia humiliated Ashley by coarsely taking off her orange top. Ashley groaned and moaned as her broken ribs constantly ached accordingly to every movement she had to make while Cynthia forced her top off. Tears of pain screened her vision. She could still feel substantial amount of pain constantly bumping up and down as her heart pounded in hopelessness. Cynthia then forged a sharp ice knife and cut the front connectors of Ashley’s black bra. She opened it up and threw the knife away.
“Now…, let me see…,” Cynthia murmured, lightly placing her index finger right on the center of Ashley’s upper bosom. She drew a line down in between the contours of her two breasts and stopped right in the central point. It was impeccably in line with the crack formed in the body of Ashley’s ribs. “Is it here?”
With increased force, Cynthia pushed her index and middle fingers into the center. Ashley let out a high-pitched groan as the rapid pounding of her heart and the pressure from Cynthia’s fingers caught the skeletal frame right in between and induced an excruciating ache inside of her chest.
The Frost clan members watched enthusiastically, seeing the first victim of their warriors suffer tremendously as their champion almost teasingly impaired and abused her plaything of a pyromancer.
The first match had begun, and Daisy unveiled her burning katana. With one slash, she could cut the cold in half, but she didn’t want it to end so easily nor so swiftly. She wanted to see every drop of Anastasia’s blood leak out as she held tight onto her struggling heart. Anastasia, without a doubt, wished to do the same to her pyromancer opponent. Her cryomancy was deemed to be quite spectacular in a sense, as well.
The two warriors charged at each other and made the first encounter with their blades. The two quickly turned their defense as both of them were pointing their weapons directly toward each other’s torso. Daisy swung her first katana violently, aiming right at Anastasia’s shoulder blades, but Anastasia cut off the vicious attack perfectly with her frost-reinforced left wrist. Anastasia then backfired with a cold and deadly stroke of her ice axe, but missed as Daisy’s agile movements allowed her to duck in time.
The two began a brutal duel, with not a single swing or jab of their weapons hitting each other. The two seemed just too fierce to be injured. 3 minutes passed as the battle started, and the audience was silently enjoying the breathtaking scene of the fire and ice collided to fill the arena with incredible force. The two fighters would never back down upon each other.
The amazing speed of the battle was briefly broken as Daisy slammed her sword onto Anastasia’s nearly indestructible frost armor once more, but kept on pushing inwards in order to pressure and tire the offensive cryomancer. Anastasia could feel it; she had never felt such force push into her armor before. She tried her best to backfire, but such move was never part of her specialties. She held on as the blade continuously crushed down into her protection. Daisy smirked as Anastasia’s expression showed the first slightest sign of distress after their Exchange. She then took off her left hand from the handle of her katana, and as sudden as she could, empowered her elbow with convulsive firepower, igniting her scorching fist straight into the mouth protection Anastasia had forged with ice.
The mouth guard shattered into pieces, with Anastasia screaming in disillusion as the burning hot knuckles made contact with her right cheek. Had it not been for the protection, her jaw would have already been dangling from her head, already disappointing Daisy, as she had not even reached the beating heart of her pathetic enemy.
Anastasia’s cheek reddened, but she was alright for now, as the exterior protection took most of the damage. However, she started to feel a wave of death swirl into her cold body. She could feel the unmatched, ferocious energy being emitted from Daisy’s heat. She had to change her plan of attack. Or maybe just be the defensive warrior she always was. She knew she had to think fast, unless she wanted to pave an easy way for Daisy to dig right into her breast. Anastasia quickly plummeted her body backwards in order to distance herself from Daisy’s close hand-to-hand combat.
It was a bad mistake. Anastasia was stupid not to notice that speed was on Daisy’s list of specialties. This was one of the typical mistakes made by second-rate cryomancers. Instead of incorporating their ice to harden their bodies and disarm their opponents, they would bring things to their advantage by misplacing their trust on their agility.
Thus, Daisy had noticed exactly what Anastasia’s plan was. Daisy ignited the flames toward her back and shot her body forward like a rocket. Anastasia was constantly being oppressed by her opponent. She could feel the pressure closing in upon her, even making her imagine what her comrades would think as they watched her slowly weaken throughout the battle.
Daisy repetitively swung her katana, with Anastasia now wrestling with her own heavy armor in competing with the momentum of the fight. Daisy only grew more and more confident in defeating her prey; making her the perfect ragdoll to play around with as soon as she seized the objective.
Time was passing by too slowly for Anastasia. She had only wished that she survived each attack. The only thing fast of Anastasia was her rapidly beating heart. It was beating so fast as to tiring the rest of her body with its speed, just like Daisy was doing to her. The fear of death was getting closer in Anastasia’s chest and she felt the heat breaking her. She made multiple attempts to at least punch back, but the blade would only keep her distant from any body part of Daisy, over and over again.
The audience was now wild. Anastasia’s heart was now being broadcast live on the big screens, and the mic implanted inside of her breasts were now recording the latest pumping of the panicking organ. The fighters could not hear the live broadcasts, of course, as the arena’s force fields blocked out any sound from the outside. However, Anastasia didn’t need any broadcasts or recordings. She could already hear her own heart racing inside her chamber from her inner ear.
Daisy was now slowing down; she was growing tired as well, of course. Her stamina could only last so long. However, she wasn’t worried so much about it. This was another strategy of the bold pyromancer. She intentionally began to throw heavier lashes onto her opponent’s shielded flesh.
