Orcus
He banished Chaosbringer before it could become shrapnel hurled from her body, just in time for a deafening boom to rock the entire cage. The arena was awash in light, burning radiance swallowing the field of battle and casting long webs of swolen, sharp shadows on every stand that surrounded it. Orcus crashed imperiously on the metallic frame, spat out faster than the dizzying thrum that filled the background. It bent around the shape of his body, curled in self-defense, and he tumbled down. At the edge of the cage he caught his fall on an unsteady arm, as the fireworks of the botched suicide maneuver dimmed.
A persistent ringing through the air settled over the closed space instead, and revealed the wide stain on the floor, like a massive and hissing blotch of ink thrown onto a canvas.
Beyond it, the fighters picked themselves up. Deep burns littered Orcus's skin, and his other arm twitched brokenly when he pushed himself up. Cracked shards and slag-ruined edges flaked off from the wing that unwound from around his face, and he coughed like he was pushing an annoyance from his lungs, finding Mira in his sight. The grimace that overlapped his smile didn't reveal how deep the injuries went beneath skin and torn onyx finery. It only twisted ambiguously over the tells of them.
"We've embarassed ourselves," he said then, apologetically winding into a loose, low stance. "But now your challenge may proceed."
It wasn't as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't pressed Vanilla to the breaking point, and she hadn't forced his brutality. For all the casualness, it looked nothing sort of astounding that the primal had escaped the ground zero of the demoness's final move with most of his limbs in place. But in the feat Mira could have caught, if she were looking, a glimpse of something essential about him. Something he didn't merely allow himself to show.
For this, Orcus could bend until he had twisted into himself, but he would never break.
