Do Not Let the Sun Go Down [Rafaela, Catherine]

Rafaela Leone had spent no small amount of time here in Africa rampaging across the barren lands. Whatever came before her was simply torn to pieces without regard for her own well-being, and a trail of corpses lie behind her. Shinigami, human, hollow, whatever it was meant nothing to her.

Before, she'd simply been incited to violence. The hollow poison that had been forced upon her aggravated her natural inclination to fight, to seek glory. But the one who had controlled that poison now lay dead, and with none to maintain authority over it, she had grown wild. One might even call her feral, sustained only by the sheer reishi of the creatures she tore down.

Whether or not she was stopped certainly remained to be seen. But she would not take anyone in front of her as anything other than prey.

Seemed like the second theoretical was right, and boy was she irritated in being right. Asher guy was dead, absolutely, but his little stragglers didn't free from control all that cleanly, now she had to deal with a rabid bunch of headless chickens camping the hole. Tch, that made future pursuits harder, but if she had to kill all the bastards with her own hands, then she'd get right to it. Already had to tell the old man to quit trying to call her for duty, he could shuffle that job off to another shmuck - this was bigger a deal than money from a hunting job.

Except her latest query wasn't some rampaging hollow, it was a girl she'd caught wind of once or twice but could never place an identity to her, it wasn't like she was walking up and saying hi. Sure wasn't acting like one, going about tearing anything in her path apart... Guessed she had to handle this delicately.

"Hey, you still able to understand me?"

After some time of carefully tailing her, finally the redhead made her presence known; dressed in dark materials with her bright hair and a fierce white avian-like hollow mask obscuring her face, sitting atop a pile of rubble with a spear and shield forged of hollow parts to look down upon the wild lady.

"Or, are you just a stupid animal wrapped up in human skin now?" She'd tilt her head, curious of what the response could be. It seemed more like she'd get a lunge, but she was ready for that.

Rafaela's eyes shot toward the woman who'd spoken to her, expression growing into a wide grin that hardly seemed to convey the violent nature she'd been wholly consumed by. She pointed her ornate sword, blood-stained as it was, toward Catherine, and spoke far louder than was probably necessary.

"Oh, I'm an animal, alright, but I can understand you just fine! Listen up, lady, because I'm not gonna say it twice! I'm the wildest, roughest, most savage force of nature on these plains, and there's nothing worse than trying to stand in the way of a storm!"

Violent purple reiryoku crackled over the blade of her fullbring, and without any further words, Rafaela swung it toward Catherine's direction, a searingly hot arc flying forward. She didn't think that'd be enough to kill, but she wasn't really looking for a quick kill like that, either.

Quite the decorated weapon, to her trained eyes even past the blood soaking it, she could tell it wasn't originally a combative blade, or much of a blade at all; if she handed anyone a blade that dull looking that old shitter would beat her black and blue for making a mockery of his teachings with subpar work. It was definitely augmented into something deadlier by it's rather noisy wielder, that was for sure. Better noisy and completely off her rocker than a rabid animal incapable of conversation, she supposed she was human enough to try beating some sense into her.

And there was the attack. Little thought was required in her retaliation, though to her opponent closing in it would appear she didn't have nearly the reaction time required to react to such an attack, until her weapon phased through the body sitting before her.

"Peek-a-boo." She was suddenly behind her! A current of green light racing around one of her arms as the empowered blow went to give Rafaela a forceful chop to the neck if she didn't react accordingly, having left her spear atop the ledge to allow a free arm.

Woah! It was a good thing Rafaela's instincts on the battlefield had been trained over the course of World War 4, and only amplified all the more courtesy of the hollow raging within her. It was true that, right now, she had more instinct than brains going on, but that was fine.

With a wide grin at the woman appearing so close to her, Rafaela simply swung her blade in a tremendously wide arc around her, a rotational slash radically faster than a normal human could have hoped to even see coming. That was just the power behind such a warrior, and it was made infinitely worse when she had no restraint, no fear, no hesitation or compassion.

Damn, her senses were still sharp enough to react to that move correctly, even in this state? Though Catherine didn't let the spell of shock take her, hardly needing to perceive it in the corner of her eye to simultaneously cease her arm's strike and instead move the flow of force to reinforce the outward swing of her shield to both block that incoming swing, and even bounce it outwards to give herself an opening to instead wind up a kick with Bringer Light's influence and send her opponent hurtling toward the dusty earth in the same movement. It felt like a hundred vibrations raked up her arm and into the rest of her body - that wouldn't have been a pleasant blow to take.

"What the hell are you even doing here? Are you fucking stupid?" She'd calmly raise her voice, heart pounding as her breathy voice spoke from behind her mask, "Asher's dead. Go home already, you moron!"

"Wha? Who cares!? You think I'm gonna let that jabroni getting his head cut off stop me from throwing down and showing why I'm the boss of this gym?"

The kick that flew toward Rafaela was pretty impressive, but Rafaela was a physical specimen that could be best described as "not normal." She had no intention of being pushed away by a creature she knew was below her, and her grin only grew wider as she simply took the blow wholesale. The momentum of her swing, after all, hadn't stopped, and the redirected blow kept her from moving too far in the other direction.

"Not bad!"

It left the two of them in remarkably close proximity, and Rafaela suspected she was the faster of the two of them based on their fight so far. Whether or not she was, though, she was intent on throwing herself into the match with wild abandon, hollow power welling up all the more in her as she swung her ludicrously heavy blade so quickly it seemed like nothing at all. The momentum of every blow kept her in motion, and in the event of another pause in the flow of the fight...

Well, she knew what to do then.

"Boss? Of what, a bunch of stupid animals? You really wanna lower yourself like that?"

This was just pissing her off now, but her focus was solely on the fight and reading out what her opponent was capable of. Before her was definitely a competent fighter, a tough one to knock off balance at that. Her blows were stronger than her, she could keep up with her, and she was damn near immovable it seemed. Above all, she was a fullbringer, and with that came the goal of separating her from her weapon, but how would she do that...

Her body reacted faster than her head to the incoming blow, the crushing blade instead coming atop an afterimage rather than the redhead herself. It was decided; there wasn't any way she was simply wrenching it away or even breaking her arm too easy, but she was a total brute. Catherine observed her surroundings as she moved, a brief reach for the ground with something tightly held in her shielded hand, she had her avenue pieced together in a heartbeat or two as she'd make her next move.

A wave of debris, small stones, and other fragments of the ground were sent flying into her opponent's face, ideally to blind her or at least briefly distract her as she'd yank something from her torso - a capsule filled with dark red liquid, quickly jamming it into a mechanism of her spear that would quickly cause it to retract into itself, the speed and force of her weapon enhanced by her abilities intending for the tip to smash into her opponent's dominant shoulder, the following concussive piercing of her spear acting almost explosively to drive a shattering blow into her.

"Lower? Top of the pack's the highest place to be!"

As the dust and debris filled the air, Rafaela's mind immediately flashed, however briefly, to the bout she'd had with an assassin not long ago. It didn't particularly give her any insights into the battle at hand; it mostly just made her angry. Contrary to Catherine's assessment, however, Rafaela was no brute; she simply fought directly, without giving the opponent much opportunity for games.

And, at present, she fought without any regard for an outcome besides victory. The spear that stabbed toward her was something she likely could have dodged if she tried.

She wasn't trying, though. Her grin only grew wider as she threw herself into the stab with egregious abandon, unconcerned even as the blow rocked through her body. She could heal that, after all. She'd already healed plenty else by now. This just gave her more than sufficient information that this was the real one, and it told her plenty about where the woman was.

All the information she needed to slam her blade downward toward Catherine at this close range, with force that left a crater in the ground without even needing to make an impact.

She didn't dodge. She's trying something - more of a feeling from observation than a direct thought, if she was lingering in her thoughts over it she wouldn't have thrown her shield up in time, physically and spiritually braced for the impact as her spear pulled itself from her opponent's shoulder with little more than the power of the impact. Her shoulder definitely dislocated, but she hardly flinched or screamed in pain, her mind was on other things.

"What, so that's it?" Still, she held her arm steady through the manipulation of souls and the strength of her will, her bones shook and her knees felt weak, yet she was still standing after that blow, "Fuck around in the wastelands with a bunch of animals for the rest of your life? Nothing but fighting's in your future? What a shitty way to stand in one place forever."

A shaking sigh left her lips. This woman pissed her off in a way she didn't fully reconcile within herself, "You don't have a home to get back to? Family? Friends? Do they just not matter now because some jackass got his hooks in you? You're fucking pathetic, weak, nothing! And that's all you'll ever be in this stupid place with that stupid way of thinking - the queen of nothing, ruler of motionless scum! How's that feel?!"

Her spear twisted and went in to strike the existing wound of the weapon wielding arm's shoulder. Destroy the tendons. Pain might not stop her, but if she physically couldn't move the arm...

"How does it feel to be nothing, to nobody, FOREVER?!"