Orion Armstrong
Listening to Arara gave him a moment of slight pause. This woman was very radically different to any other he’d met: if only because of her intensity and the way she controlled every word she said with a cunning and forethought that baffled the Bear-hunter. He had gone for a more monosyllabic approach, only because there seemed like very little else that needed saying. “Well, mission directive is pretty clear: fine partner, link devices…” he lifted up his left wrist, showing the glowing W.A.T.C.H which had a little readout of himself taking up half the screed, with the other half showing a small map of the immediate area which seemed to place them in relative solitude. “…and then find a cache.”
Orion stabbed his Polearm into the ground as he used his right hand to start tinkering with the WATCH. His first instinct was to try and figure out how to link the W.A.T.C.H.s, but something else was starting to annoy him. The device was still struggling to normalise his aura readings: The device registered that he had donned an aura shield, and had a bright green display representing that’s presumed level of structural integrity, but the device itself had yet to fully register his full aura capacity: most likely due to both the high levels of it and the lack of control. He was likely being wasteful with the resource of the soul.
“Still, I seem to have been lucky today. I’ve gotten someone who seems powerful and can tell me when I’m wearing the wrong clothes.” He offered a little smile at the joke: reflecting the little moment of conversation they’d shared yesterday. The remark on her strength was mostly true: she had the air about her of someone confident in their own strength. Most of the time, you could tell the difference between someone who was arrogant about their strength and someone who was confident in it: although he’d been wrong a couple times before. He hoped he wasn’t though, it would make the next few years much harder.
“I think I saw something in the lake, as I was…crossing over. About midway across the lake I saw something shiny: might be worth checking out, after we link these watches.”
Isaac Markeel
Isaac had arrived quickly enough upon the scene of his partner-to-be’s first bout, and was…interested to see the results of a very one sided engagement. His future associate had made a fine mess of things, with carapaces with holes in them and Myrmidons with their heads split open and, weirdest of all: his partner standing mostly untouched with one of the bugs grabbed by the throat. He waited for the man to deliver the finishing blow, but instead the stranger was…talking to it?
A moment of anger overtook him. Isaac jumped onto the scene of carnage silently, and simply stalked towards the man. He was about twenty feet away from the psychopath when he began to shout: asking about the cache’s location. Isaac couldn’t take any more stupidity and swung his right hand around. The WALTER unit started to move and in an instant, five bayonets suddenly buried to the hilt inside the right side of the Myrmidon’s corpse, one having gone through the eye and the other four having landed between whatever joints there were in the carapace.
“Are you an idiot?”
Not the best way to start a four year contract of cooperation, to be sure; but Isaac was furious. For some reason, this baboon had discarded every single theoretical combat lesson that he should have ever been taught. He may not have shared Isaac’s more elite training regimen, but even a place like Signal should have taught the basics.
“You are an aspiring hunter for fuck sake: you don’t talk to prey, you don’t rationalise the actions of prey and you certainly don’t let prey live. Act like you’re the top of the food chain or become a victim of it.” He was aping the words of his father: remembering the calm rage Isaac had suffered when he had made the mistake of getting cocky after felling a few Ursa and taunting them.
He yanked his right hand back and suddenly the five wires holding his bayonets were pulled back and retracting, sending flickers of crimson to the right of Rygar and drawing the blades to Isaac’s side. The other five bayonets were still planted at the top of the Cliffside above Rygar’s battlefield, having been the blades he’d used to climb down the Cliffside.
“Your shouting probably attracted more Grimm…What is your name?” He said, as nonchalantly as a man might ask the time.