Well his intimidating aura just shot up by roughly a 1000% in that moment, but she continued to brush it off. "Okkkkkkkkkaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy, so that was ominous, but hey, don't count me out yet, Mister Creepy Eyes!" She settled on that in place of any name since he didn't want to give her one. The guy certainly lived up to the kind of reputation she'd come to expect. He could be one valuable partner! Just had to make eye contact and boom, done deal! She lowered her eyes to study his weapon in greater detail. "That looks...kinda lame. What's it do?
There was no clarifying announcement or informative speech given once the countdown ended. Several things did happen, though. Every one of the bunker's comfortable, daylight-emulating fluorescent bulbs went dead, plunging every room and floor into pitch darkness for a few tense seconds before the auxiliary system came on to tint everything a deep red. A siren simply started to blare through every speaker in the facility, with enough volume and repetitions that it was becoming a harsh screech in the ear canal of all who heard it by the time it finally subsided a full minute later.
And finally, all hell broke loose.
A series of clicks, foldings and contractions occurred across the chassis of every single one of the legion of androids that mostly avoided the more expansive areas but prowled virtually every one of their connective hallways in legions, the figures that arose far more fearsome than the user-friendly and nondescript look of before.
There were a handful of brazen souls expecting fodder on the level of the Atlesian Knights who lost their lives in those opening moments. Those were the units of an army, cost-efficient to construct and mass producible while still being top-of-the-line. These were something else. Privately funded cybernetic nightmares, the product of one of many Atlesian-born geniuses who somewhere along the way decided lending their talents to the underworld was a more prosperous choice than dedicating themselves to the military or progress. They were the kinds of enforcer bots a crook might dump their entire life savings into a single unit of if they were expecting huntsman or huntress interference during a major score, and plenty of unremarkables in the profession had met their ends trying to fight a single one of these things.
Even for the prodigious like those here, trying to take on any more than a half dozen at a time was pushing it. The droids instantly started firing indiscriminately at any competitors in range, hardlight beams projected from narrow openings in their right palm even as they charged those close enough with the claw-like digits their left extremities had locked into.
Sparing the briefest of glances over his shoulder before he continued on, he scoffed.
"Guess Jabberwocky should have shelled out more lien..."
Then he was gone on a search for his partner to be.~
"...FINE THEN! DON'T HELP!! I’LL FIND THIS TIARA GIRL MYSELF!!!"
The thunder child spat in the general direction of where the two had gone, sticking out her tongue afterwards before Valkyrie spun on her heel, annoyed grumbling escaping her lips as she stomped off. It wasn't much to go on, and she had no idea how well this tiara girl could match up with her as a partner but at this point? If he were here, she would have settled with having Brosel as a partner! If I was a tiara girl, where would I be...? Detective Nora was on the case.
Just like at Beacon, she'd had an obligation.
One she'd see through to the end no matter what.
As the siren droned on, Ruby raced through the halls, Crescent Rose at the ready.
It'd truly, truly, been too long since she'd been able to use her beloved weapon in combat.
Vanishing in a trail of rose petals as a hardlight beam soared through where she'd been standing. She reappeared with her scythe raised overhead, her eyes widened and full of one thing.
Determination.
Detective Nora hit the first major roadblock in her investigation as her ears barely registered a second noise approaching under the cover of deafening sirens once the countdown ended, rapidly gaining in volume as whatever it was homed in on her location with targeted precision.
She barely avoided the dust-imbued bladestaff as it embedded in the wall inches from her skull, its superheated edges effortlessly melting through the steel alloy as it was yanked out by an invisible force as suddenly as it appeared. Said force promptly had it spinning all the way back across the span of the arena, straight into the grip of the figure she saw as a small dot in the distance—One that was rapidly growing, focused as it was in a mad dash straight for her.
She couldn't see those eyes. Not from this distance. But somehow it was like she could feel them, and with his prior disposition and the nature of his frenzied sprint for her it was hard to imagine an eventuality where he had any intention of letting hers meet them.
Her pestering of him had not yielded her a partner, but it had given him his first target.
"Seriously, guy?? I say a few words to you and you come at me like that???" Nora grumbled, but well, she supposed it was inevitable. This tourney was a deathmatch, and it was filled with the worst kinds of scum...so sooner or later she'd have come across somebody who madly wanted to kill her, as this unknown scary faunus guy clearly wanted to, just as she absolutely did not want to die. As he neared, she fired to cover as much of the arena as she could manage with grenade fire, uncaring about any collateral damage that came from her repeatedly pulling that trigger.
It was him.
The kid who'd punched her through a wall back in Mistral.
The only one who'd been able to land any kind of blow on her at all for that matter.
It wasn't something she'd forget so quickly. From what little she'd gathered, he obviously didn't care for the Shadow Fang or those affiliated with it. Fair enough, she didn't expect a human to understand. Personal feelings didn't need to enter the equation anyhow. All that mattered was fighting to your heart's content using all of your might. Their skirmish hadn't lasted long but he had potential within him. Perhaps he just needed someone to draw it out of him. Growing up Tiger hadn't exactly had a figure like that herself. Training to control and harness your strength came after trial and error. Only in her case 'error' meant if she'd accidentally mangled someone or demolished a chair or table with the slightest of taps.
As Hazel kept his focus on the perimeter, he might have noticed the shadow that grew to loom over him with each passing moment.
"The boy from Mistral. Are you going to punch me through another wall?"
A voice called out once the other masked figure had departed.
The voice was quiet.
The pitter-patter of boots against the floor followed it.
"That was quite the intimidating figure, wasn't it?"
"Hello Gretchen."
Oh. Crap.
That was some Professor Glynda like moves, and none of it spelled good things for her. The grenades that got flung her way just made that even more obvious. The first explosive or two she managed to avoid but the third slammed into her and sent her flying back from the force of the blast. The others peppered her general area after and then through the resulting smoke that blade raked repeatedly against her aura, pink crackling and shimmering with each slash before it got pulled back. Alright, this really wasn't going well. Not at all.
Magnhild shifted into warhammer form and she quickly slid in one grenade in a brief reload as he caught his bladestaff, and she dug in her heels as his rapid charge resumed. Lightning sparked about her as she generated electrical energy inside and forced what she could in that brief time into a boost for striking power, and roughly about two seconds before he got in range to slice at her with that staff, she brought her hammer down. Not on him directly, but on the floor of the arena between them as she sought both to cave in that floor some, as well as have the force of her strike blow him back a ways and hopefully disorient him. Immediately after that she flung her weapon straight up as hard as she could, and rather than pull the hammer back down to her, the purple glow on her gauntlet instead brought her up into the air in pursuit of her hammer.
Her fingers curled up around its hilt, and by that time she was a few levels above where she had been and thanking from the bottom of her heart that this arena stretched across multiple levels like that. Her finger pulled Magnhild's trigger with the intent of having the sole grenade she'd managed to load up propel her through the air towards a balcony to land on...and then run the hell away.
To heck with fighting somebody who can throw things around like Glynda!!!
