by Turkish Stringfellow
Grimm flew backward along the bridge with grunt. He slammed hard, sliding into the ivory-white marble railing, the stone splintering with a burst of powdery haze against impact, his axe rolling to a clattering stop a few feet away. Tiny chips of white fell from his shoulders as he scrambled his hand up onto the railing.
With a quick burst, he pushed himself from against the railing, rolling along the surface of the bridge. A large reptilian tail continued slamming against the stone, shattering anything it touched, trying to pinpoint the leatherclad giant.
Grimm's breath came in a panted rhythm, suddenly halting his roll, catching the enormous tail with both hands. The bare end, stretching beyond his two hands, flipped and snapped with writhing irritation. Bare teeth, stretched along a bare skull, gritted with exertion as he lay flat on his back, straining against the tensile appendage, its tip-end striking the concrete around his head with a flurry of marble splinters.
"Die, weak flessshling!" Dr. Zachary Knell in his lizard form hissed at Grimm, pops from two Peacemaker specials sparking along the inhuman, scaly hide of his elongated neck.
Dirk Bell continued his advance, unloading his arsenal onto the former respectable scientist. No words. No banter. Bell's eyes, narrowed as they were, sparkled with the strobe-effect pops from his guns, his precision and accuracy a solo testament to a song from Hell.
A titanium slug tore into Knell's right eye, an inhuman howling as it did so. Grimm, from his lying position still holding the tail at bay, immediately launched his foot solidly into the beast's stomach. The momentary distraction evident, Bell dropped his automatics, whirling a .357 Magnum from its chest holster.
He launched himself at the creature, firing more shots, as Grimm lunged to his feet, throwing a right cross... straight into Knell's waiting left palm. Catching the punch perfectly, Knell's viselike grip flung Grimm ten feet straight across the surface of the bridge. Simultaneously, Bell jammed his barrel point blank into the creature's tattered eye socket. Jerking the trigger, Knell had already caught Bell with his right hand by his throat, the shot sparking off his forehead.
Bell squirmed as Knell held him three feet off the ground for a brief second. Then, squeezing his palm together, Knell waited for the crunching of Dirk's esophagus... which never came.
Knell tried with all of his might to crush the man's throat, but for some reason the muscles in his hand wouldn't comply. He suddenly noticed a tall, bald monk staring at him from off to his left.
He growled with rage, even as Dirk, red-faced and gasping, maliciously whipped a diamond-bladed dagger from his boot. Grounding the perfect-cut blade into Knell's wrist, the beast howled again, flinging the man hard against the marble railing. Blood freckled the ivory-white stone as Dirk slumped, dazed.
Knell spun, ripping the dagger from his wrist toward the tall monk... just in time to catch three quick shots to the head from a roaring Grimm. The biker from Hell pounded away at the man, grunting with every shot. Every shot, vibrating, and cracking the stone upon which they stood.
"Grimm!" Turkish Stringfellow announced, flinging his hand toward the fallen axe across the bridge, and then, with a sharp jerk, toward the giant. The axe immediately launched itself, flipping end over end until landing perfectly into Grimm's waiting palm.
Knell caught Grimm's lunge by his wrists, the two combatants straining against each other's inhuman fortitude.
There was a short yelp as Danny Hearn flew over Knell's head, arching straight over the side. Turkish immediately flung his hand out to ask the air to halt his descent.
And nothing happened. Turkish frowned, looking at his hand in bewilderment. Slowly, almost as if he could feel his presence, Turkish glared over his shoulder toward the castle archway.
There, where the bridge met the Castle of Crossed Destinies, a young man smiled, his billowing cloak flapping against what seemed to be no breeze at all.
"Come, little prophet..." Aurochs muttered with a sneer. "Come and tell me of your gods..."
Turkish's eyes narrowed as a wavefront of anti-inertia spread out toward him. A single hand raised, Stringfellow countered the wave as the stone bridge, caught between the two opposing therma-dynamic fronts, rippled yet didn't crack.
The monk began sprinting along the bridge toward the mage, his bare feet gliding with impossible speed, making no sound at all.
Aurochs lowered friction beneath him, Turkish immediately side-flipping onto the narrow railing, but his pace never slowed. The mage whipped his fingers in the air, and light crunched along the borders of the bridge. Stringfellow leapt with a single bound, the tearing of atoms rolling under his feet, landing precisely in front of the man.
"'Little'?" Turkish asked, his six-foot-seven posture towering over the man.
And with that, the stone moorings of the never-castle began to vibrate and lurch from their infinite structure. Aurochs waved his hand in front of himself and took a single step backward.
The mage was suddenly twenty feet away, standing arrogantly on one of the Dali-like multitude of stairwells criss-crossing and intersecting impossibly from all sides.
Turkish leapt onto the side of one of the cases, his feet landing softly on the marble steps. Aurochs was standing above him, stretched out horizontally from his current position. The two began launching wavefronts of gravity and inertia, the very nature of this place twisting the forces into unexpected reactions.
And something flickered in the back of Stringfellow's mind. Something familiar about this place. Something that felt like... home?
He landed perfectly along the railing, upside down to Aurochs' stance on the stairs below. Equilibrium, by this point, had ceased to function, as Turkish felt gravity naturally pull from fifteen different locations.
Stone hands rippled up from the stairwell, Turkish dismissing them into so much dust with a wave of his hands. A long, slender column of stone shot from his eastern perspective, coming down and right, as he sidestepped the maneuver and, with an effortless grace, sliced the column into two separate pieces with his bare hand.
A clap of stone, and a small haze of white dust emanated from the strike, Aurochs pausing with amusement. "So, the prophet can get his hands dirty, eh?" the mage laughed with a sneer as he clapped his hands together.
The sound wave from his clap billowed out with the force of an explosion. Twelve marble staircases shattered with an immediate thunder, fragmenting them into pieces no bigger than a pair of feet.
Or, a rather large pair of feet, for that matter. Turkish, in a dazzling display of absolute inhuman agility, accuracy, and complete disregard for physics, ran along the pieces of flying debris, against the force.
Hopping from rolling chunk to chunk, Turkish dodged, flipped, sidestepped, and generally avoided the entire shrapnel field of the onslaught, landing into a final crouch right in front of Aurochs.
The mage's eyes were wide with amazement as he took a step back from the slowly rising man.
"Only when I have to..." Turkish replied.
Before he could ready a defense, Aurochs' head snapped back with a spit of blood, catching Stringfellow's sharp, flat hand to the face. The mage hit the floor, unconscious.
The reverberations and echoes of clattering stone fragments, still falling and cracking off staircases above and below, were the only sounds evident, apart from the carnage of battle still being fought outside.
Turkish sighed, his hands back into their customary folded positions, as he surveyed the explosion radius.
"Like dancing on rain..."