As the arrows approached Carmine, she steeled herself and began to pullback on the trigger of her weapon, sending a micro-grenade directly into the ground below her, exploding and breaking her free from the ice. The blast knocked her backward into a tumble, stopping just before one of the streams of lava that flowed down the volcano.
The girl paused for a moment. She shouldn't but... she'd had enough. Enough of this match, enough of the arrows, enough of playing on the safe side. It wouldn't hurt to just finish him off quickly, it couldn't. It's won't.
These thoughts raced through Carmine's head as she kicked back off of her feet and launched herself into the molten rock.
Malina, now on the sidelines and leaning on her staff, watched in horror as her teammate willingly flung herself into the lava. She knew what was coming. Carmine knew. Carmine should have known not to. But it was late, way too late, to stop her. She watched as the aura gauges positioned around the arena marked Carmine's aura shoot up past the 100% mark, higher and higher. Verdant didn't know any better, he was still closing in on Carmine.
This wasn't good. This couldn't happen.
Malina unceremoniously lifted herself up with the help of her staff, and began to run toward the lava stream, growing faster and faster as she went along and ignoring the yelling from Vulco or the security staff.
A figure began to rise from the stream of lava, the molten rock slowly dripping off of her and falling to the ground, soon to rejoin the greater whole. She slowly lifted her arm and fired a shot slightly ahead of the encircling opponent, sending out the grapple reel and grabbing him by the chest. Verdant didn't have any time to react as he was jolted off of the ground and strung through the air to Carmine. As he approached, he finally got a good look at her face as the lava dripped away from it. Eyes full of hate, anger, fury. There wasn't a drop fo remorse, pity, or mercy in those eyes and those eyes were the last thing he saw before CarmineFayza lifted her arm up and struck him directly across the face, faster than he'd seen her move the entire match. The blow sent him rocketing down into the rock below him and as his head bounced off of the rock, his hearing became muffled and accompanied by a low ringing noise.
He heard the muffled yelling of Vulco screaming something about interference, a group of male voices, and the voice of his other opponent yelling Carmine's name. As he opened his eyes, he could see a pair of legs, Malina's getting closer and closer and as she approached, the ringing got louder and louder. A sharp pain shot through his body as he tried to lift his head higher up and simply let it fall to the ground instead. He saw a staff, a weapon, drop onto the ground behind the pair of legs running toward him and Carmine, he saw the pair of legs leap upward and knock into Carmine. As the ringing became nearly deafening, he saw the two pairs of legs falling down to the side.
And then they were't.
Suddenly, Verdant found himself midair, loosing the final arrow of the match and sending it flying directly into his opponent's chest, dropping their aura gauge to 13%. As his feet planted back down into the riverbank that the two pairs had been fighting around the entire match, he had the sudden thought that something wasn't right.
In fact, the whole of the people watching, and many around the world, had the same feeling. Like they had a plan to do or get something but as soon as they set off to complete the task they completely forgot what they were hear to do. It was right there a second ago, they could still feel the thought in their minds and they knew it had to have been important but as hard as they tried, there was nothing there. Those recording the event even rewound to check to see if they had missed something important but all they found was what they remembered.
Juno and Verdant had squared off against a pair of Mistrali students, a boy and a girl. Their environment was a riverbank that was fed by a stream coming from on a large mountain in the southern quarter of the map. The two Beacon students had beaten them handedly, wiping out the other team in a show of skill.
After all, there was no such people as Malina Nahualli or Carmine Santiago and there were no such places as Alapelagias, Shaula, or Pilum.
And somewhere, an older Rose than Big Rose smiled.