This Gonad was quick; he’d stepped forward near in time with Lobo to close the distance, throw off the aim of his strike, and strike in turn. The barbarian was also practiced; the attack Lobo had mistaken for a blow and angled the Moon Hunter to intercept had in fact been a grapple, one intended to pin his weapon, and in fact succeeded in doing so. He was also powerful, in that the moment that grip stopped his swing dead, Lobo he knew he would not be getting his weapon back without a fight. When he’d set foot in the ring Lobo had known nothing of his opponent beyond his name, but without a doubt, he could be sure this man was a warrior. 

Crude? Absolutely. Untrained? Most definitely not. Self-taught, perhaps, as it was not unheard of to encounter a fighter who had honed their craft through instinct, rather than learning, but only a fool who would think them any lesser for it. To a punch a hundred, a thousand, an hundred thousand times, would sharpen it into a deadly strike whether it was throw in a dojo or in one’s own bedroom. Filthy, uncivilized, unwashed, beneath Gonad’s rough exterior beat the heart of a man who had been forged in combat. 

Just as the countless scars marring his body were clue enough to any who knew to look, the bow Gonad now held in his iron grip had itself had likely been hint enough to the fact that beneath Lobo’s extravagant costume, gaudy mask, and luchador trappings beat the heart of an assassin; a proper staff was a weapon for cornering, trapping and suppression. A bow was a weapon for hunting, disabling, killing.

As Gonad’s head shot forward, Lobo’s was rocked backwards from the impact, brutal as it was, but not far or as fast as it might have been otherwise. A helmet would have offered protection against the blow to a point, but the protections afforded to Lobo by his mantle were not so simple. Imbued with the Roaring Flame, his mask was incredibly resistant to impacts, and as such he was able to stave off the worst of it, and retained the presence of mind to continue as he dropped into a crouch, leaning back heavily with his tail for balance as his left heel slid forward, his right hand drawing back as a violet arrow and a pitch black string -- both of them alight with a crimson flame burning near to pink -- materialized in his grip. The shot would be ugly, but it was angled to bury the the arrowhead an inch or so below Gonad’s sternum and from this distance, Lobo hardly needed to aim. 

There had hardly an instant between the impact and the attack; Lobo had drawn back the bowstring but a few inches, using the condensed energy of the Silent Flame that composed it to expand those inches into feet within the string itself, and the coiled power of the Roaring Flame to pack several thousand pounds of pull into the weight that string carried. As a result ‘twang’ of the bowstring as Lobo fired erupted with the force of a cannon blast as the arrow shot forth with more force than the flame construct had ever been meant to take… so much so that it simply exploded instead, launching a massive ball of red-violet flame directly into Gonad’s upper body.

The effect would be two-fold: the crimson fire of the Roaring Flame would subject Gonad's entire upper body to an incredibly powerful shockwave, with such force as to not only put one to sleep, but to put them through a wall -- quite possibly the wall of the cage, in this case -- while with the violet Hissing Flame that Lobo Negro had earlier demonstrated came a powerful and debilitating poison.

Lobo allowed the force of the explosion to carry him backwards as he kicked backwards off of his right leg, his mane and shoulder pads smoking from the heat as he flew across the ring, digging his claws into the boards to bring himself to a halt. He'd left his bow behind in Gonad's grip, but could get along just fine without it. The question remained as to whether or not he would need to.