Time: Before Indulger’s introductory storyline
Place: First Fist’s rundown mansion, all present
***********************************************************************
Attacker: How did you lose?
Pursuer: I’m a stupid shitty dog and I can’t help sucking.
Remover: Alerter, translate properly
Alerter: *sigh*
Pursuer: Fuck off Tacker, useless bitch.
Attacker: Yeah, let us hear what he has to say.
Alerter: I am.
Pursuer: She is.
Attacker: You got your ass handed to you by some bitch I never heard of.
Pursuer: He was fucking enormous.
Attacker: I’ve seen you throw a skyscraper, Pup. Didn’t Averter say this guy didn’t have Ultra strength at all?
Pursuer: You are correct and I am a bitch.
Attacker: Let him talk, babe, you heard Remover.
Pursuer: There was no one afraid there.
Attacker: He wasn’t afraid of you? You are a fucking werewolf.
Pursuer: Yeah, but he didn’t give a shit.
Attacker: And the fucking crowd?
Pursuer: No one is afraid of people in the ring. They don’t think that we will come out and kill them.
Attacker: But still, no powers or whatever..you are still a werewolf. He is still a dude. Averter said that up in the ring, off the ground, he wouldn’t have any powers at all.
Pursuer: *growling noise*
Alerter: Long speech incoming guys, hard to parse. I’ll try and make his voice work right, but he’s really putting a strain on the tooth clack code we use.
Pursuer: Look, I don’t really fight hand to hand without being Ultra strong, alright? I can’t even remember the last time it happened. This guy apparently does it all the time. He was stronger than me and a better fighter. He kicked my ass.
Attacker: Bitch! Some random fucking wrestler kicked your ass, and you just take that shit? What’s the fucking point of you if some jackass can completely clown you out.
Pursuer: He might not have been afraid of me but you, on the other hand….
Alerter: I’m not letting you say that to her!
Pursuer: *growling noise*
Remover: Quiet.
Remover: We are going to kill this guy. I’ll put the story out that you let him win just to build up his confidence, so it was all the sweeter when you killed him, something like that. Not everyone will believe it, but it is better than nothing.
Averter: There might be a problem with that.
Remover: What?
Averter: From what I’m hearing, this ‘Indulger’ skipped town right after the fight.
Alerter: Where is he heading?
Averter: No one knows. Apparently he just heads out into the wilderness sometimes, stays out there for months.
Remover: Fuck.
I had missed this chapter when it came out! So Indulger defeated Pursuer without any powers? That’s pretty cool! My question is: why was Dale not afraid? Was he that confident that Pursuer’s powers came from fear? Or did he have some kind of backup, like being able to jump from the ring and hit solid ground?
Anyway, this is awesome and I’m sorry I missed it!
Dale is generally pretty fearless. Especially on the context of a wrestling match in a ring, I’d expect him to be pretty confident. He might even assume that Pursuer wouldn’t actually hurt him since it’s just a match and not a real fight, although I don’t know that much about the context of these fights and what Dale knows about then.
Maybe he thought it was all kayfabe? After the Thor beat him Dale realized his mistakes in treating the fight like a one-on-one match — maybe before that it never occurred to him that the opponent would go outside the bounds of wrestling to kill him?
Also — confirmation that Pursuer draws power from fear, like Alerter does from soung and Attacker does from killing people. This team has a lot of “area affect charge up” bonuses (not sure what the right term is).
(Then again, so does our protagonist Fist — Dale with the ground, Fisher with light, Condemner with burning stuff and people. Maybe this is actually pretty common…)