AV 19 Hardcore Championship - Jessica Wright (c) vs. River Styx

Jessica felt it. It was a pure move, undesecrated by anything as useless as tact or technique or taste. It was a move that schoolchildren use in the yard as they fight, a headlong charge led by one of the hardest parts of the body. The Violent Violet was not able to face it, but she knew from the feel that the move had worked exactly as she had intended it to. She took a step back to find River on the concrete floor, grabbing her chest and rolling on the ground.

But she only looked for a second. River was down, but it was going to take a lot more than that to get River down for the count. She lunged under the apron, madly groping around for anything that she could find to cause as much harm as humanly possible. One of her purple eyes stayed on River, looking for any forward movement that may threaten her.

She found something metal. The Violent Violet didn't want to take the second to figure out what it was just by sense of feel, opting to yank it from the darkness and find out what it is only in the powerful lights of the arena. As it turned out, it was a chain. Jessica could work with that, swinging it in the widest arc she could get it before she attempted to slam it down onto her former lover.

Styx had been out of the ring too long, and it was becoming far too apparent. She’d gone soft, forgotten what it was like to really suffer. She was reacting too much, had lost the edge that turned her into a force to be fear in the AFW.

So, maybe, in a way, this whole clusterfuck of a situation was a good thing. The wakeup call she needed. One last gift from the Violent Violet.

It was one of the few good things she could think of, anyway, so it was what stuff with her for the moment. She needed all the comfort she could get right now, as she tried her damndest to rise up once again. She was having a hard time of it, though, and judging by the sound of clinking metal nearby, it wasn’t about to get any easier.

Sure enough, she heard a slight whistling through the air before her back was lit on fire by the chain, laying into spine and no doubt leaving a blazing red mark on impact. ”Fuck!” Styx jolted to her feet and staggered away, gritting her teeth to deal with the immense pain. Still reeling, she only made it a few feet to the steel steps before she had to drop down and plant her palms on them, needing their support. Still breathing hard and heavy. Not out of the fight, not yet, but definitely in a bad place and looking for a way to make it better.

Jessica was holding onto the chain tightly. Every single link in the chain was pulled tightly thanks to the forces of physics as the chain swung downwards in its wide and graceful arc, and Jessica felt all that tension dissipate as the chain slammed into River's back. River's loud curse told Jessica that the move was a good one, and that Jessica ought to try something like that once more in the future. Her former lover was not going to be content to make it easier on Jessica, as she stumbled away from Jessica. The Violent Violet was going to be right after River, charging forward once more.

This time, she had both hands on the chain, a little bit apart. While River was still on her hands and knees, Jessica was going to try and jump on her back while she was still vulnerable. If she could land there, she would bring that chain below River's neck and pull up as hard as possible. The Violent Violet was attempting to strangle River with the chain. It was curious to her how close there were now, physically. Mirroring so many nights that they had had before.

Situation recall - Styx was hurt, on the floor, suffering from the effects of having her back waylaid by a goddamn chain. Not the best of situations, no, on top of the damage she’d already taken in this match. Knowing Jessica, there would be plenty of pain to come. So, what was coming next?

Well, what would she do in this situation, if she were Jessica? She’d probably use the chain to choke the shit out of her opponent. Sure enough, that was what happened a couple of seconds after she had the realization - a shame she wasn’t in any position to stop it.

The metal wrapped around Styx’s neck and came into, biting in her flesh and making her croak. The audience cheered, either because they were getting behind Jessica’s turn or because they were really wanted to see Styx get hers. Either way, they seemed poised to be satisfied - it would’ve been hard enough to escape this with a normal woman on the giving end, and Jessica Wright was far from normal.

Growing wild and desperate, Styx reached under the ring’s skirt with one hand while the other fought for air against the chain, knowing her salvation was somewhere there, hidden in the dark, just waiting.

Ah. That’d do.

Gripping the object of her freedom tight, Styx pulled the fire extinguisher out from underneath and swung it up and back, hoping to hit Jessica in the face with the makeshift weapon.

Jessica felt the body heat of River reflecting her own. The Violent Violet was a turtle's shell, a fly's wings, a shark's fin. The Violent Violet would have glued herself to River's back had she the opportunity, but she was doing a pretty good impression with how tightly she was trying to stick to the bald woman. That would be putting even more pressure into the choke on top of securing a dominant position. River was tougher than most women Jessica had known. But even the toughest of women ran out of oxygen. With all of Jessica's weight on River's back, that pool of oxygen would deplete itself sooner rather than later.

Jessica was facing the other way as River was reaching towards the rope. She felt a shift as River's hand left the concrete to a destination yet recondite for the Violent Violet. She soon found the purpose of that shift as something heavy and presumably metal slammed into her head, causing immense pain to Jessica. The grip on the chain loosened as Jessica fell off to the side. Her back slammed into the concrete, and now she was only holding the chain with hand.

So. Styx managed to dislodge Jessica and free her neck from the chain’s grip. What was the first priority on her list?

Breathing. Lots and lots of breathing.

She stayed on her knees, palms to floor, gasping in big lungfuls, doing her best to refill her lungs. It felt like her throat, which had been depressed, was finally getting a chance to straighten out after the squeezing, and it would be a while before it was back to normal. That had been close. Far too close.

She needed to even things up, and she needed to put a handicap on Jessica. Thankfully, she had a good tool for that already available.

As Jessica laid on the floor, chain in hand, Styx stood up and stepped over her prone body. With the fire extinguisher tight in hand, she pulled the pin, aimed the nozzle, and let it blow full blast into her face at point blank range. CO2 to the face? Oh, that would suck. That would suck hard.

Jessica was on the ground, with a chain in her hand. That same chain threatened to squeeze the life out of River mere seconds ago, but now it only served a cosmetic purpose, adorning the prone Jessica with its promise of violence to come. It was cold in her hands. She knew what a lashing chain could do. There would have been more momentum had she risen from the harsh concrete and gotten all of her body into the gigantic swing. The Violent Violet was preparing to do just such a thing, when River was up and pointing the nozzle at her. Jessica opened her mouth to protest yet her rage died in her throat yet inchoate, smothered by the shrewdest concoction of the great age of industry, a foam that would extinguish the fire burning inside the hardcore champion.

She coughed and sputtered, doing what she could to rid herself of the horrific taste in her mouth. Her purple eyes were closed. In one moment, Jessica was rendered mute and blind, unable to speakin a way that made sense. The one language she could still articulate was the language of violence. Jessica swung the chain that she had in her hands. There was a destination, but it was recondite to the champion. A silent prayer of the wrestling gods was lifted on high as Jessica wished that her chain would hit home.

The audience booed Styx as she blasted Jessica in the face - more than usual, anyway. While this was ostensibly a match between two ‘bad guys’, the Violent Violet’s proclamation at the start of this had been enough to change some hearts, it seemed. There were cheers for her, scattered as they were, and when Styx blasted her lover in the face, she could feel the hate coming over her like a fresh, fiery wave.

Good. Let them hate. It would make this all the sweeter when she took what belonged to her.

And she was taking it. Using the fire extinguisher like this would’ve been considered dirty by most standards, but it was well within the hardcore sphere: using whatever you could get your hands on, any way you saw fit. She’d made the most of her opportunity, and she was just about to capitalize, raising the extinguisher up high and preparing to smash it down on the back of Jessica’s skull. A quick, brutal end was about the best she could offer Jessica.

Unfortunately for her, fate and Jessica’s instincts had other ideas, ideas that involved him getting whipped in the face by a chain. It caught her flush against the side of her jaw and sent her reeling, dropping the fire extinguisher as she went to the side of the ring and leaned on the apron for support. ”Goddamn it…” She spat off some blood to the side. ”Fuck!”

Jessica was totally blind. She was raging at something large and incoherent that she could not make manifest. River was there, yes, but she was fighting against every single part of herself that told her that she was not good enough, that she had to cheat to win, that she relied on weapons to get her through the match. It was not lost on her that she was using a chain now to get herself out of the situation, but that was something that she could rectify in short order. Most of all, because the sound of something metallic hitting the concrete floor and the fact that River was swearing meant that River no longer had the fire extinguisher. Any moment that Jessica was not being hit with a fire extinguisher was a good moment in her book, and she was going to take the time to cough and sputter and do what she could to recover.

The Violent Violet scooted back to give herself some space, and then rose from the floor. The chain slinked down to the floor and she took a few steps back, to reassess the situation. Jessica imagined that a lot of her fans imagined her covered with a different white liquidy substance, but Jessica did not take the time to wipe it off her. It was all that she could do at the moment to brace herself for the next set piece, to get ready for the next onslaught.

"Fucking swing that shit next time, might be more effective," Jessica taunted, oblivious to the fact that she was very nearly hit except for her desperate last gasp at her former lover.

Styx took a moment to run her tongue over her teeth as Jessica spoke, making a quick sweep for anything broken. Never hurt to be sure in a hardcore match. As near as she could tell, everything was in its proper place. Her right canine was a little loose, but that was typical, nothing to be worried about. Her skull had taken most of the damage, but that fog was starting to clear, and she could see Jessica rising up through it.

She needed to get back over there, now. Needed to close that distance in the most violent way possible. She wanted a weapon, wanted to just throw something at Jessica, but the only thing she had on immediate hand was her body.

It would have to do.

Gritting her teeth, Styx reached up to grab the bottom rope and pull her waup to the apron, getting one foot on it and then the other, until she was only solid footing. With her target in sight, she shook her head to get her mind as clear as it could be, then broken into a stumbling run on the edge of the ring, charging straight towards the current hardcore champion.

The moment she was close enough, Styx threw everything to the wind and launched herself into space with wide open arms, attempting to come crashing down on her opponent with a full body splash. One that was backed by about 200 solid pounds, nothing to scoff at.