to a point

"You're as blind as you were then," Mumkhar cries, shoving Dunban back to give himself space for more full-flung swipes of his red-hot claws. Whether it's blood or ire that makes them glow so vehemently is anyone's guess. In fact, just the sheer force of his rage and utter commitment would be enough to light the flagons and sacrifice a body on a plinth.

It's like pair figure skating, steps and sidesteps perfectly synchronized atop the crunching snow. All colors cold, even the yellow-gold of the inscrutable gypsum crystals beaming light up into the sky, to an unknown endpoint or else to god. Only the battle itself, the bitter duel, daring to thrum like a violent heartbeat, cavorting curses out of cavacious chest.

How else could one ever conspire to snare such a partner?

Just as the very elbow of Dunban's blade is poised to strike against Mumkhar's left claw and steel there, distortions in a dislocated palace between mountains, Metal Face's pilot continues his deadly proclamation: "I've wanted you dead for years!"

And everything stops.

Dunban hardly hears the word ringing knells for his untimely death abound at all times.

Mumkhar's jagged, angular visage, beady eyes and flat lips and inexplicable upturned brows (they're bound now to the rest of the armor wrapping his skull, blocky and breaking the boundary between metal attached to the face and metal becoming it).

His ribcage, decorated in a sheen of puce above navy, is ridiculously elaborate. It looks like a mere decoration, a show put on for all those who ever denied Mumkhar the chance to become strong, but then, Mechon don't a skeleton to hold up their pounds of flesh. This substructure might as well be visible, the more to taunt its unwitting victims who decry the beat within the machine.

For years. Wanted you (dead) for years. In this way, Mumkhar admits and explains that it's not only the grudge that has sustained.

He remembers who he once was. Oh, how he remembers. He feels it now; it burns and burns.

And it's not as if he doesn't know the difference between a silver-cold word and a white-hot knife.

What Mumkhar isn't is smart enough to make a particular choice of this revelation as a distraction, that he might run Dunban through just as he'd once done his sister, who was his lookalike in all the ways other onlookers would never be keen enough to notice.

Mumkhar's not smart enough to be snidely cutting, just as Dunban has never been cruel enough to spurn him on purpose.

The Hero of the Homs requires brutal bluntness, in this way. So Mumkhar will deliver it, and also the caress of claws, caving right through his crass, cravatted chest.