RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES // rescue

[RED]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]The first thing he feels is a sickly crack. It rivets up his leg and he looks down to see it, his foot - his cleaved hoof, muddied from the jungle trek - twisting at an angle that would make anyone with half their rationale ill. The pain doesn’t quite register, like waking up from a car crash: he sees the damage, but if he feels pain it’s instantly replaced by a steady pulse of adrenaline that makes him feel less than mortal. He can take it. He always has, and he always will. The guilt, the weariness, it will hit him later, at a time that feels unreal in the present moment. All that matters is now, and right now, he feels nothing but a tingling numbness in his ankle that spreads up his nerves as a steady buzz until it reaches his skull.

And then the pain hits.

The sound that escapes him is less of a roar, and more a twisting monster of a vocalization that wrenches itself from his throat like a wild animal. He feels the fire that blazes like a crown above his head, hot on his face, and it only seems to exacerbate the pain rather than soothe. This power that he held was meant to be his savior, his strength, but rather than ground him he only spiraled upwards in a never-ending power trip. In these fleeting moments, he thinks not of his friends and family, nor what they see of him, but of death, of Hell itself.

When he comes to in the morning, he will regret all of this. He’ll numb himself until he cannot see the blood on his hands or the violence wrought by his weapons; then he will force himself to suppress, but never forget. He was doomed to lose his temper again and again, every mistake a step closer to a death sentence. But until then, it just makes him angrier, makes him picture the blood that will spill from the dragon’s chest when he kills them, and the child becomes hardly more than an inconvenience in his blinding rage.

Red staggers, once, and heaves his heavy fist downwards to slash away the vines that bind him. His breath comes out as ragged gasps, wisps of steam rushing from his flared nostrils and hissing out between his bared teeth. Uncaring for the agony it sends up his spine, Red turns around to face Aine - a fatal mistake, perhaps - and slams his injured hoof against the ground to raise himself up once more. The expression on his face twists into something unreadable, a mixture of pain suppressed by a wrathful grin that borders on smug; he drags his hoof through the dirt like a charging bull, kicking up dust and debris that turns to ashen sparks as they meet his flames.

”Run,” The word is barked out into the chaos of the battlefield, to Aine, to her father that attempts to protect her. He won’t hurt them - he can’t. But he won't let them stand in his way, either. ”Leave this place!”

/bai shi can capture him and then ill be out!!