[03] Forest Sector

[DA 2009]

FOREST SECTOR

Time Of Day: Dawn

Bunker: Inactive

Starting Players: Sage, Belle Hibiki

[Sage]

A mad rush of sensation pressed hard against the blank canvas. It hurt. Pain. This one overwhelmed the rest. For a while, nothing happened. She hesitated to move or to open her eyes, because it might intensify the unpleasantness she felt.

Trepidation had to concede to utility, however, and Sage’s tightly closed eyes broke into slits, and dilated pupils shrouded in a wincing gaze rapidly contracted. It was getting bright out. How long had she been asleep.

The girl reached out to push herself up off the grass, but as soon as she pressed her palm onto the ground, she let loose an ear-piercing howl of pain, and immediately dropped onto the ground again, grasping her arm as she quivered in misery.

Finally, breathing through clenched teeth, she opened her eyes to see what was wrong with her hand. As realization dawned, the look of pain on her visage fell away, replaced with a mortified stare.

“M-My... my hand...” the girl stared at it as her heart sank. Her right hand was charred black, and her skin beyond - from her wrist almost to her elbow - was a deep red, covered in blisters. She had gotten her claws stuck in the stasis field, she recalled.

Sage remembered everything, then, all at once, culminating with her accidentally stabbing the stasis field. Desperately, she tried to get away as the electricity ravaged her. She remembered she was screaming and crying and shaking, all the while fighting to get away from the source of her pain.

She was going to cut her arm off. Sage almost gasped at the recollection. She brought her claws up to sever the trapped limb, but then she succumbed to the electrical storm raging through her. The rest, she couldn’t remember. How she escaped, she didn’t know. Maybe Belle freed her-

Belle.

She had chased after the poor boy, relentlessly, and without mercy, thinking he was someone he wasn’t. Oh my God, Belle, she pressed her good hand against her head, wincing at the pain it caused. Actually, her head throbbed. He must have struck her at some point. Hard.

The blue haired girl couldn’t blame him, though. She looked around herself, to find that Damon hadn’t teleported her away. Maybe he wanted her to see this when she woke. The aftermath of her fury.

Ice and snow still pervaded the forest; an interesting property of Sage’s ice was unnaturally slow degradation. The snow was hardly the part that scared her, though. Felled trees littered the place all around her, and spears of frost lay embedded in trees and rocks and the ground. She had waged war on poor Belle, who must not have had any idea what was going on. Sage shook her head.

So it really, truly was all a lie. Sol wasn’t really here. She had felt so close. Sage bit her lip. She had let herself slip so far into madness just to extract the slightest revenge. Was that really who she was? A vengeful psychopath who would cause so much harm just for the prospect of harming someone who had harmed her a long time ago?

Sage found herself in tears for the second time in a long while, but this time, not from her injuries. She had cast aside everything that made her who she was for the chance to hurt someone she didn’t like. The pretext didn’t matter - she entered a blood sport in hopes of finding a man she wanted to murder.

But she would worry about that later. Maybe she wouldn’t kill Sol when she found him, if it would dissuade her conscience. But she needed answers, and those she could still get. Maybe she needed to... just take a step back first, before she did something terrible for real.

At that, a small smile crept on her face. If nothing else, the whole episode with Sol being superimposed upon Belle affirmed something, finally. This really, truly, was all a farce. Nobody was going to die if she killed them. Even the horrific injuries she had sustained - it was all cosmetic. It would be gone when this was over. And that meant she would finally be able to treat this stupid game exactly as what it was - a game. Maybe her sudden epiphany would keep her a step ahead of Dukes, before he tried to damage her already delicate psyche once again.

Sage winced and groaned through clenched teeth. Fake or not, her arm hurt like it was on fire. Her hand was charred so badly, she couldn’t even feel it. She had to assume it was lost, but still, she hovered her good hand over the burned one, in an attempt to heal herself. It was the first time she’d ever needed to, since discovering her powers.

The soft blue glow washed over her damaged limb, and then-

Fzzzaaaat!!

Sage recoiled, slammed backwards onto the ground, and shrieked as loud as she could. The girl arched her back and began to convulse, screaming and shouting at anything that would lend an ear.

Finally, after many agonizing seconds, she fell limp, breathing hard.

“Okay,” she wheezed, defeated eyes staring at sky. “I c-can’t... heal myself...”

The girl sat up after a while, and began to look for a good place to treat herself traditionally, before the worry that she didn’t know how long she had been unconscious for reared its head. She might get dusted soon, and that would mean Dukes would have her genuinely killed!

But the pain was far too intense to go on. Sage looked around for a moment, and then, with a sigh, she reached out with her good arm, and then hesitated. She was going to freeze her damaged limb, but... something seemed off. With a grimace of both revulsion at the sticky, disgusting feeling of her charred flesh, and also out of the sheer, painful hell it caused her to touch it, she used her good hand to force the charred one into the shape of a fist. It was a fight, after all.

Carefully, she encased the charred fist in ice, and then coated the rest of the burned flesh, up to just below the elbow. The cool, glassy ice felt like cold silk draped over a scrape. Immediately, Sage’s whole body relaxed, and she closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, exhaling a sigh of relief.

It still hurt - it hurt so unbelievably much - but the pain felt farther away. She had some morphine and other painkillers. She would administer to herself more properly within the safety of one of the bunkers.

Backtracking to her bag, she awkwardly unzipped it with only one hand and fished out her map. City Sector, Mountain Sector, or...

The most hostile environment to everyone else, and the most hospitable one to her. Nobody would willingly brave the Arctic Sector. Except, of course, for Sage. For the first time looking forward to something in the depraved game she was playing, she set off for the frozen wastes the map promised her, and hoped she wouldn’t come across Belle, at least for a while.

The boy probably resented her for what she did, and he had every right. But more importantly - at least, for now - Belle was a threat, above and beyond anyone else in the competition. The last time Sage had lost herself to a rage like that, nobody who intervened escaped with their lives. She was stronger now. Her technique blunted and her powers raw, but noticeably deeper. She had realized it some time ago, but didn’t know what to make of it. She shook her head. The point, she reminded herself. Is that Belle shouldn’t have been able to survive.

Sage pondered this, and other things, as she made for the shelter that awaited her in the wastes.

- - - - -

The girl easily glided over slick ice and deep snow, bouncing overtop of all of it as though she was completely weightless. Though she would have preferred not to have to fight anyone else, she hoped that if a fight should occur, it would happen here.

Sage was literally in her element in the Arctic Sector. There were only wide, empty, frozen expanses all around her. Not even Belle would have stood a chance if they fought here, and not in the forests.

She frowned, then. What was important wasn’t fighting, it was winning, she reminded herself. Sage rubbed her head with her good hand; she was scaring herself again.

But the bunker just poked over the horizon, so, mercifully, her mind would be distracted from her dreary moral conflicts. At least, for now...

Sage moves from the Forest Sector to the Arctic Sector

Sage enters the Arctic Sector bunker