Setting a Pattern: Spectre vs Yuri Yoshika & Natsuki Muramoto

[Malkavia]

Hardcore Match: Elimination by pinfall, KO, or Submission. The use of weapons is permitted.
Handicap Stipulation: Spectre must eliminate Natsuki AND Yuri, who may tag in and out following standard tagteam rules.


"Come OOOOOOON Yuri!! What the heck are you doing??"

Yuri had stopped outside the Tokyo LAW Facility's front entrance. She held her hands clasped at her waist and stared at her feet. As the others pulled ahead, she had stopped. Frozen on the steps.

"Mmm..."

"Hey! Ah..." Sayori took Yuri's hand in her own. Yuri's eyes trailed up from her feet, up — drooping like a guilty dog's — to Sayori's warm blue eyes.

"Doing alright there, bug?"

"I..." Yuri's voice was a dry rasp. She swallowed, tried again. "I don't know if I can..."

"Hey girls!" Monika waved at them from inside the facility's main hallway. The carpet inside was blue and covered in tiny copies of LAW's silver logo. The wide open area was bathed in sunlight from the glass wall. "Maybe we can talk about this somewhere other than the main door?"

Several people had already had to walk around the soon to be competitors, shooting looks as they squeaked past. Yuri's face reddened. She squeezed her palms closed — wet and hot and yet clammy and cold and sickly — but she could not will herself to cross through the door.

The world begin to spin. Round and round until Yuri's stomach hurt.

"Yuri." Monika had stepped to the door. "I know you're feeling overwhelmed and...I guess that's maybe normal. But you know Natsuki's depending on you, right? And we'll all be there, cheering for you. And can you pleeeeease maybe step just a little bit inside..."

Yuri couldn't look at Monika. She felt petrified. Literally. As if her bones had turned to cement, and the contagion of cold stone was spreading through her blood. She forced herself to breathe.

"It's OK if you wanna bow out of this one Yuri..."

Yes please.

"N-no..."

"OK great, let's go then—"

Sayori pulled Yuri into a tight hug. She squeezed, harder and harder, until her fingers pressed almost painfully into Yuri's shoulders. Yuri gasped under her breath.

"I was so scared for you last week, when you were on the ground after that big...punch." It had actually been an elbow. Finally, Sayori pulled back and looked Yuri in the eyes. She was smiling, but her eyes had filled with tears.

"Geez, Sayo, c'mon...Mmmf..." Natsuki's voice faded, and Yuri was fairly sure Monika had just stepped on her foot. But Yuri's attention was focused on Sayori. The shock of her eyes was like a stone that had broken through the top layer of ice on a pond. Yuri felt herself loosening.

"You were so brave going in AND coming out. But I wouldn't want to go back either after that. And it's really, really REALLY OK if you don't wanna..."

Yuri hugged Sayori so hard it lifted the smaller girl's feet of the ground.

"No. I...I do want to. I—I apologize." She breathed in—felt the cool air turn warm in her lungs, mixed with her blood, fill her up and clear her head. Then she let her body deflate and put Sayori back on the ground. She breathed again, and...stepped into the building.

"I let my...nerves get the better of me but. This week, I'm going to do better. Um. With, Natsuki, of course. I'll perform more closely to the...expectations set by Monika."

And would ensure next week Sayori would not have to cry.

—

"NATSUKI!"

A pink tigerface flashed on the titantron! He had eyes with fire curling in his pupils! And claws! Claws reaching right out of the screen to rip his enemy's face off her face. A storm was brewing around him, and...

"Yuri!!"

...A Chinese dragon with purple scales and beady black eyes FWOOSHED out of the gray stormcloud. He stared at you with almost as much intensity as the big bad cat, his scaly hands pressed together in some kinda...

Eh, Natsuki wasn't sure. Some kind of karate or kung fu grip.

...Yeah that part was Yuri's idea.

—Whatever! It still looked badass.

"ONE TWO THREE LET'S GOOOOOOOO!"

When her entrance theme picked up what Monika and Sayori were laying down, Natsuki ran straight into the bright lights.

Entrance Theme: Lady Baby

"WHOOOOOO! Heeeeeey theeeeeeeeere TOOKYOOOOOOOO!"

...It was hard to run in a gi, especially as one as loose on Natsuki's body as this one. The gi had also been Yuri's idea. Yuri had gotten to do a lot of ideas, since Natsuki got to pick the entrance theme.

Natsuki bounded out of stage right, Yuri out of stage left. They met in the middle, then jogged the rest of the way to the ring together. Natsuki hollered, hooted, and whistled. Yuri...

Well, she just kinda. Stared at the ring. Eh, she's just being intimidating! Like uh—a Russian mobster or something!

Natsuki

Yuri

When they finally got to the ring, Yuri was the one to clamber through the ropes. She had a bit of trouble with the middle rope. It got...caught on her arm. Somehow. Natsuki wasn't sure how she managed it, but it took a solid four or five seconds of awkward adjusting for her to figure it out.

Staaaay positive Natsuki...!

She hopped and shadowboxed ringside at the corner.

"You got this Yuri!"

[Monsy]

Match Nine.

Two versus One.

Doki Doki League of Champions.
A cute little name for a quartet of lambs.
Her knowledge about them was eyebrow raising. They were a unit. A single soul divided amongst four bodies. Four brains, infinitely stronger than one. Their spirits were reinforced by one another, with good vibes brighter than the Aurora Borealis. They must’ve known to hide their digital presence. After all: they were blackbelts. Two more than what she owned. Just what were they doing in the Young Lioness league anyway...

Spectre had an answer prepared for that kind of challenge.

She had spent her nights building a wonder weapon no boxer or God ever fathomed: Punch-A-Gun
It was a cross between an airsoft gun and a potato launcher, but with a purple boxing glove fitted to the end. It was stuffed and there was a rod attaching it into the rifling and rifle chassis itself. There was compressed air attached to the back and inside the stripped stock, screwed in and loaded. Then the trigger was nothing special. She fitted it with three modes on a dial on its frame.

Safety.
Single-Punch.
Rapid-Punch.

It rested on her person with a strap going over her chest, around the shoulder and down, coming out around her waist, attached to the stock. She was waiting for her time, watching pretty closely and then popped her entrance.

Three… Two… One…

[media]]

!

An echoing choir beat hit the arena. The Chrome Skull slapped on the titantron with its spinning purple nuclear eye and respirator. It glitched around, causing the screen to go black before returning. Audio buffers. Delayed calls from the commentator desk. They shouted…

Commentator One: “OH MY GOD… IS THAT…”

Spectre was descending on her typical cable and hook. The gun was present across her chest in a diagonal resting position. Her usual getup otherwise. Grabbing that cable above her head like she was some fucking stoic model.

Commentator One: “IT'S A NINJA WITH A GUN! A NINJA WITH A GUN!”
Commentator Two: “A NINJA WITH A GUN?!”
Commentator One: “A NINJA WITH A PUNCH GUN!”

At the six-foot point, Spectre unstrapped the gun and held it proper, then stepped off her hook. She descended, smacked the top-turnbuckle with ankles together, knees and toes parted. Afterwhich, she stood tall over the ring, spotlights behind her casting a shadow. Then hopped in. Once entered, she took her side of the ring, casting a serious squint at her pair of Heroines. She aimed her Punch-A-Gun, then flicked it off safety to Single-Punch. Her finger left the trigger-guard for the trigger itself. Then she took aim from her hip.

It was time to show this pair of Champions the true power of technology. That not even Blackbelts from a League of Champions can contain a Virus.

[Malkavia]

Something struck Yuri, like a stone arching through the sky to finally crack her skull open, exposing her boiling brain to the crisp, unrelenting light of hte sun. Something obvious, so obvious she almost collapsed under the sheer weight of her own newly perceived stupidity.

My God... Her hands raised to her face, as she stood in her corner, staring at the math. She hadn't brought a weapon to a hard core match.

A NINJA WITH A GUN...!

Christ save me... She licked her lips, still not daring to look up at what had thrown the commentators for such a loop. She had often wondered: What precisely prevented wrestlers from bringing guns to matches that permitted weapons? She had assumed it to be some combination of golf-style gentleman's honor and the cold reality of a Japanese penal code transcendent of LAW's norms. But some of the things she'd seen...and heard...

A NINJA WITH A PUNCH GUN!!

Punch gun? Yuri's brow creased as she looked up.

Spectre was...unlike anything Yuri had ever seen at LAW, which was a tall accomplishment. She suddenly regretted screwing her eyes closed when Spectre had entered the ring; she could only now imagine this tiny yet imposing creature descending on a wire, like a vampiric lord lowering from the black Cloud into their game, imperious and terrible.

The punch gun itself fascinated Yuri. It was hard to make out the details from this distance, but the chromy fist at its business end already marked the weapon as a truly unique contribution to the illustrated compendium of LAW's armory.

Yuri took a huge breath and held it as she stared down her opponent. Today, you get to spend a while in the ring with someone cool. That's all. And all she had to do was survive long enough to mean something. And however spectacular Spectre's presence might have been — with her cruel mask and preternatural influence on technology — she was, at least, nearly half Yuri's height.

You could rest your elbow on her head...

DING DING DING!

"KICK HER ASS YURIIIIIII!" Natsuki bellowed through her cupped hands.

"GO Yuri, GO!!" cheered Monika.

"WE'LL EAT CUPCAKES IF YOU MAKE HER ... EH... BLEED A LITTLE!! And er—iiiiif you don't too! WE'LL EAT CUPCAKES YURI!!"

Yuri lowered her chin. Stared at Spectre with the cold, dead eyes of the girl she saved for the ring. Took a sideways stance, with one foot pointed towards the enemy—and began to shuffle towards her.

[Monsy]

The Punch-A-Gun aimed higher due to Yuri’s height.

The machine was aching to get a taste of its first belly. Since the blueprints reached the metalwork, she had daydreamed just what kind of opponent this would be perfect for. All of them involved some sort of belly window, not really a gi, which meant she’d need to tear open that part herself.

Even so, the biggest prize of the night was showing their years of martial arts training as inferior to the power of technology and engineering. All the blessing of genetics: destroyed by pure genius.

It's with pleasure that she raised the reticle to her eye, aimed for their tummy and the trigger was squeezed for a shot.

Click.

She quietly groaned.

Click. Click, click. CLICKLICKLICKLCICKLICK

Her eyelids drooped to cover half. She picked her elbows up and thrust them down with a miffed groan.

“Timeout.”

The referee’s brow quirked. “Timeout? There’s no timeout! You fight!”

The referee’s hands clapped together as if to simulate their forces colliding. “Fight!”

“One minute.”

Taking a left, she went over to the ropes and laid it across the top rope. At first she tinkered with the air canister and then the different modes, then wiggled the boxing glove before finally just knocking the barrel with her fist and then…

PEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!

The boxing glove, the steel on the inside and the rod popped right off in a POP. Air pressure sent it hurling at huge speed, able to cover the ring faster than a finger snap. The gun itself flew out of Spectre’s hands to go towards ringside, leaving her defenceless and perhaps helpless against two expert martial artists…

[Malkavia]

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING????"

Yuri rolled her eyes. That should have been pretty obvious, she thought. She was waiting. "She said timeout!"

"Ooooh, are there timeouts in LAW? Gosh, I wish I'd known that...a week earlier..."

"No Sayori, there are no timeouts. The referee just said that."

"MOVE YOUR ASS YURI!"

"If she isn't prepared for the fight, she deserves an opportunity to—"

One instant: Yuri stands in the southwestern quadrant of the ring, fists up, hair loose, looking annoyed as her team harangues. Then, faster than a woman could blink, faster than the eye can trace, faster than a camera can record—KA-POW! A boxing glove appeared in the space previously occupied by her stomach. Her feet left the ground; her limbs — all four of them — flew horizontal to the mat, like streamers caught in the wind; spittle flew from her mouth. The force carried her clear from the center of the ring to the ringpost, where her back slammed the turnbuckle with an audible CRACK.

Then the glove fell, like a bullet casing, onto the mat, bouncing and rolling under the bottom rope. Where it hit Yuri, it had burned a hole in her gi, the size of four ordinary human fists, leaving her belly exposed. A bruise was already forming, a deep, blotchy purple where the steel knuckles had annihilated her abdominal muscles. Her core twitched and writhed, making her whole body jerk as she tried desperately to catch the thread of what just happened.

Yuri's eyes popped like saucers. Her mouth worked, but there was no air in her gut to make any sound. She peeled herself off the turnbuckle with a spliiiip — like a poster peeling from the wall it was taped to on a hot day. She took one, two steps forward, finally breathed with a trembly, aching gasp.

"...OK! You took a hit Yuri! But she's lost her weapon! You can take advantage and—"

A whine bubbled up from Yuri's gut, her eyes rolling up into her head, as she collapsed in the middle of the ring.

[Monsy]

Ninja instincts immediately pulled Spectre’s attention to the flying travesty of her hours of hard labour. It smacked a tummy alright. Right into that covered gut. A hole with ash-y lining and curled up material with a centre of yummy bruised skin. Spectre was still.

Very still.
And they flopped.

“...”
Were they meant to do that?
Mmm, no. Definitely not.
Spectre planned for more of a long-form meat-grinding session. The kind of Taco Tuesday shit when the ground beef is taken out the freezer, and you got to play with that shit in a big steel bowl. The ring was the bowl. That tummy was the meat. And she held the tenderizer. Ok, she DID hold the tenderizer.

Her brows drooped.
“Great.”

When dealing with Yuri, Spectre stood over them with a foot on either side. She squatted down and untied the gi’s belt, then opened up her belly. Her cheeks instantly lit up pink seeing all the spread bruising. Her next breath felt warm and dopamine laced. Her fishnet hand spread fingers across it, slowly following Yuri’s abdomen, to the breathing of their chest, the look in their rolled back eyes and then…

Natsuki.
Otherwise memorized to Spectre as ‘Loud Girl’
She started staring at her from here, blank and still squatting over Yuri. One knee was folded in and by Yuri’s ribs, while the other foot was planted near the opposite shoulder. She sat on their upper-abdomen, putting a hand on their collar just below the neck to enact the pin.

“ONE!”

[Malkavia]

Welp, now her tits have been on TV.

"Come on Yuri—Kick! Just roll to the side!"

"Tsk." Natsuki rolled her eyes. Her fingers drummed on the mat, and — while everyone else watched floppy-tit McGee over there — nabbed the boxing glove at stage right.

"TWO!"

"Yurrrrrri you gotta kick!"

Natsuki was the only Doki not screaming her head off at this point. What would be the point? She had better things to worry about as she scurried around the ring. To the gun she'd seen fly out of Spectre's hands.

As she yanked it out of the spotlight, she noticed Yuri's eyes flit open. Oh? A spark of...something was there alright. Her body turned tense. Her mouth flew open, just in time to—

"THREE!"

Yyyyyup. Ding. And there was the bell for the elimination. The other Dokis' shouting died down like a siren with the batteries pulled out. A dick going limp.

Yeeeeah, no. We're not done girls.

Natsuki leapt into the ring behind Spectre. With one fluid motion, she screwed the boxing glove back onto the weapon's business end. Clunk-click, as the gun's socket accepted a long metal pipe from the glove.

Alright! Smooth as butter on a well-made pancake. She lowered the gun at the back of this masked pipsqueak's skull, delivered a badass one liner—

"Hey Skeleloser—You dropped this!"

—and pulled the trigger!

CLUNK!

The glove went flying—way wide of Spectre. It smacked a ringpost and ricocheted eighty degrees straight up like a fist-borne rocket. But Natsuki didn't see any of that because the KICK on that gun was like an ass. In the biblical, eats hay and kicks Natsuki in the snout sense.

CRACK!

"—CRAP!"

Blood spurt from her nose, she stumbled backwards, dropped the gun, slammed her head into a turnbuckle, then fell forward.

—

Out in the crowd, Sayori stared at the ceiling, transfixed.

"Three Miyazaki... Four Miyazaki..."

Momentarily distracted from the match, her eyes followed the arc of the glove as it fell. And fell. And bounced off the back of Natsuki's head.

"Woooow..."

Six Miyazaki! Sayori wasn't very good with math or physics, but that glove had gone...really high!

[Monsy]

So much for Karate Master number one.

She looked at Yuri’s dumb-drunk face one more time and felt mildly cheated. The kind of ‘wow, that was easy’ feeling that almost facilitates a form of regret where she wished she played with them more. But a corpse is a corpse, and she still had one more.

Loud girl.

Where did she go?

Spectre looked around, then over-shoulder, coming face-to-face with her own gun.

FYOOM!

It could’ve been WAY worse if Loud Girl just had slightly better aim. The force of a small car was behind it. And it seems… if Spectre’s cocked brow was right… Loud girl had just knocked herself fucking out.

And her glove. All the way to the fucking stars before that last clunk. Her soul just left.

“Can’t you just wait five fucking seconds before making an ass of yourself? Either of you? Just five little seconds so I can get my data, and then you can drop dead.” Spectre stood up and walked over to the downed girl, then looked over to collect her gun. Now in her hands, she flicked the safety on and did a quick field troubleshoot by looking at the mechanisms from the side.

She noticed something missing…

Spectre kicked the downed Natsuki on the shoulder.

“Hey. You eat a little fitted bit for a demolition hammer by any chance?”

Kick-kick.

[Malkavia]

Natsuki tasted rare steak. Mmm. She licked her lips. Very rare—still warm. Needed salt though. She couldn't smell crap. Something felt funny about her nose, like it was hanging off her face wrong. A knob that had been twisted...

She opened her eyes. Blinked. Crap but the lights are bright.

A boot bit into her shoulder, kicking her. She jolted away, shouting. "Hey, watch it!"

"I mean, technically..."

Yuri's voice — beleaguered and pained as it sounded — dragged Natsuki back to her who, what, and where. She lurched to a seat, backing away from Spectre like a confused crab. As she scuttled, Natsuki grabbed the metal fist that had plummeted from the sky and hit her head.

Yuri sat in the ring corner, she noticed, her belly still bare, in spite of her having re-tied the gi. "Technically, I imagine you did collect some data from this little fiasco. Pretty useful data, actually. For example, while I'm no engineer, it seems to me that the force involved with the firing mechanism is a bit um. Overtuned, shall we say."

Natsuki brandished her steel fist, waving it at Spectre as if the redheaded ninja were a werewolf and the heavy ammunition a torch.

"GET OUT OF THE RING!" Natsuki hissed. "You're going to get us disqualified!"

[Monsy]

Hey, watch it!

Was not a correct input.

Just as Spectre was about to bend this girl to eat her own cunt out, Yuri had reawakened. Spectre’s attention was piqued and she turned around. What Yuri said made perfect sense to her, though.

“Hmmm—”

Loud Girl strikes again. For a moment, Spectre touches her ear and lifts up her shoulder, making a small wince as Natsuki shouted in a way that became sharp against her eardrum. So, in a split second, Spectre kicked her foot right back like a mule, aimed at sending that piece of fitted steel and boxing glove directly into their blabbering face.

Once that was dealt with, she approached Yuri in the opposite corner, squatted down and put Punch-A-Gun across her thighs.

“It’s fired by pneumatics.” She tapped the pressurized air canister on the undercarriage.

“Could rig a control dial to fix that issue. And some shock absorbers.” And a more secured pin for the boxing glove.

But before she said that, she looked at Yuri's belly.

“Speaking of… What’s your pain like? On a scale of one to ten.”