Right, so now the two of us were locked into this pipe together and Tumbleweed wanted me to show her what I had, what I was capable of, what I was… huh, there was that funny feeling again. Sure, that made sense, of course I would be nervous now, right? Right. So here went nothing-- wait, that was a really bad term to use in context, wasn’t it? Here went a lot of cool shit that was gonna fully blow her mind!
No sooner had I let that thought pass through my mind, injecting myself with a jolt of adrenaline, than I found a use for that adrenaline. Namely, throwing myself sideways to avoid the incoming girl herself as she rebounded off of two obstacles, then off the wall near me. Each bounce made her move faster, becoming a blur of motion that I was barely able to mostly avoid with a quick trigger of the green rabbit image I’d painted over my upper shoulder. Even then, her hand grazed my side as she tried to grab me. It was all I could do to throw myself hard enough to pull out of her grasp. I didn’t want to think about how easily she could have thrown me down at that speed to score the first tackle.
I dove out of the way, and for a second I was a little worried that the judges would interpret me hitting the ground after she hurtled herself past me as Tumbleweed scoring a tackle. But no, they were very good at their jobs, they had to realize that it was a dodge on my part, right?
Well they’d certainly realize it soon enough, as I sent a quick shot of blue-green paint at the ground and activated it right before I would’ve hit. I was sent rebounding off that spot and hurled toward the ceiling. On the way, I activated blue paint on my shoes, flipping over in mid-flight to bounce off and instantly ricochet back the way I’d come. With a little extra speed from the still-active green paint. Tumbles wasn’t the only one who could take advantage of bouncing.
Unfortunately for me, she was aware of that and had already lunged out of the way before I could hit her from behind. Both of us narrowly missed one another, landing facing opposite directions before spinning on our heels. I caught the briefest glimpse of her fist coming at my shoulder and managed to twist back the opposite way from how I’d been turning an instant earlier. Even then, I still caught a quick, glancing blow, which was enough for a sharp jolt of pain.
Still, I gave as good as I got, my foot lashing out to kick her in the side of the leg at the same time that her fist was hitting my shoulder. Which meant her own yelp joined my own, each of us landing that quick hit together. She tried to follow up her own punch by grabbing my helmet with her other hand so she could hold me in place. At least I assumed that’s what she was trying to do, but I wasn’t exactly going to sit still for it. Instead of snapping my head back, I gave it a quick jerk forward, essentially headbutting her fingers as she was trying to grab on. There wasn’t enough space between her hand and my helmet for me to get much momentum going, but it still clearly sent a slight stinging sensation through the girl’s fingers and made her stop very briefly.
Before she could recover and try to attack me again, I hit both of her feet with a shot of red from each hand, then activated more blue paint on my own shoes to propel myself up, grabbing her shoulders on my way as I flipped over her. While my hands were on her, I used the physical contact to paint the whole top part of the girl’s formerly purple sentai-like outfit a mix of red-blue. Wait, purple was red-blue, so this was still right. I was just separating the colors a little bit, so hah.
I essentially did a very brief handstand on the woman’s shoulders, momentarily making it so that she was standing upright and I was balanced upside down with my own feet pointed toward the ceiling, our heads touching. Which probably looked cool for the cameras. At least I hoped it did, we couldn’t hear any audience reaction from inside this tube. Then I continued my quick motion, flipping the rest of the way over her to land behind the woman so our backs were to each other. In the same move, my hands snapped upward, sending a shot of red at the ceiling of the pipe.
Tumbleweed was trying to twist around once more. But before she could do more than start to move, I activated the red paint I’d left on her shoes, as well as the red on the ceiling. Instantly, her feet were yanked out from under her as she was flipped upside down and sent flying that way. Which, of course, she would simply rebound off of. Her own bouncy power would probably overwhelm my paint’s ability to hold her in place. At least I assumed that’s what would happen.
Or it would have. But I didn’t let it go that far. Before she actually hit the ceiling, I canceled the red paint and activated that red-blue mix I’d left on her. That was the combination that yanked the target straight down. So in an instant, Tumbles went from being launched upside down toward the ceiling, to being sent crashing straight to the floor. My hope with all that had been to take her by surprise with the confusing, disorienting direction change. She had just started to react to being yanked up when she was instead sent down before she could actually adjust to it.
It worked. Well, with one more addition. As the girl was yanked past me to the floor, I jumped on her back. I wasn’t actually sure if the judges would count me just using my paint to knock her down as a full ‘tackle,’ so I figured throwing myself on top of her would help that decision a bit. Besides, I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t just rebound off the floor with her own power still, so I wanted to make it as close to a real, genuine tackle as possible. That had to help them count it.
We hit the floor of the pipe together, and she actually stayed down for a brief second. I was on top of her, and she landed hard, bouncing just a little but not enough to throw me off her. Not yet anyway. A second later, I heard a chiming sound, and a voice called, “Tackle one to Paintball.”
That was good. Unfortunately, I’d barely had time to process what I was hearing before Tumbles reacted rather forcefully. She slammed her hands against the floor, and that was apparently enough to trigger her power, launching us up and backwards. I was carried along for the ride, my back hitting the wall of the pipe. While I was still grunting in pain, Tumbleweed managed to twist around me, even before we’d finished bouncing off that wall. Her left hand caught my right arm while her other hand caught my shoulder, and then I was flying back toward the ground. It came up too quickly for me to react in time, and I felt her feet land on my back while I collided with it. There was another chime as the same voice announced, “Tackle one to Tumbleweed.”
We were tied. Which she was clearly not exactly satisfied with, given the girl immediately tried to grab my arms once more. But I had already shifted into my pink-liquid shape, so her hands went right through me even as I scooted my puddle-self backwards between her feet. Then I reformed into my body, rising until I was back on my feet behind the woman, my hands lashing out to smack into her from behind. Which might not have seemed like it would do much considering I was still in my paint form. But I had gone from being pink for the puddle, to being orange instead. I was the orange gummy version of myself, which meant I was very solid rather than liquid. It was enough for the impact from my hard shove to send the other girl stumbling forward.
But she wasn’t exactly just going to let me knock her down without fighting back. No sooner had I shoved her forward and moved to follow up, than the woman dropped down. It took me by surprise, the way she instantly dropped. I hadn’t shoved her that hard, had I? That wasn’t what--
Her feet snapped up and back, colliding with my helmet. She had thrown herself to the floor intentionally, caught herself on her outstretched hands, and then rebounded in a sort of diagonal backwards arc while snapping her feet up to full-on flying backwards kick me in the face. Or in the visor, anyway. With her bouncy power, there was enough force with that impact to snap my head back and send me stumbling. Even though my orange paint-self was mostly immune to pain or damage, it still had to obey at least some of the laws of physics, so the momentum that the girl imparted in the kick made me stagger. I nearly tripped over my own feet, but caught it.
Unfortunately, she took advantage of that before I could recover. The next thing I knew, she had managed to land back on her feet and flip around, catching my arm while I was still recovering. With a quick twisting motion, she flipped me over her shoulder and sent me slamming to the floor on my back. Again, no amount of being immune to damage stopped me from being thrown around. I landed hard, still a little bit dizzy from being flipped over like that, while the voice once again called out the tackle update. Tumbleweed had two. One more and she’d win the points in here.
I couldn’t let that happen. No way in hell. So, even as the girl went to yank me back to my feet, probably to send me flying again, I was already shifting my gummy-like self from orange to blue. Her hands bounced right off me as she tried to grab on. Before she could finish reacting to that, I heaved myself up just a bit, getting my body most of the way off the floor, then slammed myself down as hard as I could. With the blue bouncy body I had now, the impact launched me upward, right into the woman who was still crouched over me. I crashed into her. Sure, my body was mostly liquid then, but I wasn’t intangible. The impact was still just enough to knock her off me.
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No sooner had I made it back onto my feet, than I went from being blue to red. In one quick throwing motion, I actually sent both of my gummy-like hands flying off my wrists. Usually when I made my paint-self red, I would simply tug bits of myself out of my side or whatever to throw them. But in this case, I didn’t want to take the time for that. So I simply jerked my arms forward hard enough to actually make my own hands fly off. Which probably looked a bit creepy and gross, but oh well. One of the flying gummy hands hit Tumbleweed in her own helmet and splattered across the visor to obscure her vision, while the other hit the floor in front of her. An instant later, she was yanked forward and down, almost being forced to headbutt the pipe floor.
Of course, she wasn’t going to make it that easy for me to get my second tackle. Her hands snapped down to hit the floor first, and she used her own power to rebound off that, flipping up into the air and over my head. I caught the slightest glimpse of her passing by and heard the woman hit the ceiling somewhere behind me. Which meant she was probably just about to--
I threw myself sideways and pivoted at the same time, even as Tumbleweed went sailing right through the air I had just been standing in. Yeah, she had been trying to tackle me from behind. Which, all things considered, even in my paint-form the judges would probably go ahead and count it for her if she managed to knock me down like that. That’s how I would do it, anyway. Which would’ve been the end of this little pipe fight of ours, with the girl taking all those points.
But I hadn’t given her that chance. Once she went flying past me, I continued pivoting, trying to bring my leg up and around to kick her from behind. Maybe if I hit her and it happened to be enough to send her to the floor with all the momentum she had, that would count as a tackle.
But no, it wouldn’t be that simple. Tumbleweed was too quick for that. Even as she missed her attempt to crash into me, she had already tucked herself into a ball, making my foot whoosh right behind her without making any contact. She hit the floor without any help from me, bounced off it and--wait, backwards. She was bouncing backwards, her body already untucking and spinning around with her leg extended to--to kick me in the helmet. Even as I realized what was coming, it hit hard enough for my head to snap to the side, stars appearing in my eyes as I very nearly fell over. I actually stumbled that way, legs starting to give out as my vision swam. I had shifted back into my solid state to try to hit her and she managed to turn that against me, landing a hard blow that very well could completely knock me out of this whole fight for good.
But at the last possible second, even as I saw the floor looming up in front of me while my knees were buckling, I caught myself. Even better, I instinctively realized that my opponent was already following up her earlier attack from behind me and slightly to the side. The sound, the slightest glimpse out of the corner of my eye, common sense, it was all just enough for me to realize what was coming. She’d landed and was spinning into a sidekick directed right at my torso, trying to take advantage of my momentary daze and stumble to finish this before I could actually recover.
There wasn’t time to focus on shifting into my paint form. But I could activate paint I already had on me. A quick thought was enough to trigger a blue-orange image of a flying bird that I’d put on-- uh, well, not to put too fine of a point on it, on my backside. On that part of my costume, at least. I’d kind of put it there as a joke to myself. A sort of, ‘if they’re about to kick my ass’ thing.
Anyway, I managed to trigger that paint combination right as her foot was colliding with my side. Not a literal asskicking, but close enough. That particular combo sent the damage right back at her, and I heard a yelp of pain, followed by a wheeze as Tumbleweed stumbled away from me.
There, that was the advantage I needed, the chance I needed to recover from my own near-fall. I shifted my entire body into my green-paint self. Now I was three times faster than I normally was. Yes, still liquid, but it would help anyway. With the new added speed, I spun back toward the other girl while snapping my hand out. She had been flailing toward me, and my paint-hand was enough to knock hers to the side. It probably looked a bit odd, given the way bits of me splattered away at the impact, but still. In my case, it was like hitting someone with a firehose. I was basically very fast-moving liquid in a humanoid shape. Even as bits of me went flying, the droplets immediately pulled right into me again, schlooping back to my main body just like that.
Even as my left hand managed to knock hers out of the way, I was already right there in front of her. My boosted speed made me much faster than Tumbleweed was accustomed to dealing with by that point. She was still twisted just a little from the impact of having one hand knocked out of the way, and I took advantage of that, my other hand snapping up and around to slap into the front of her helmet with a decidedly wet smacking sound. Not hard enough to knock her down, but it did make the woman’s head snap back a bit. And I didn’t give her a chance to recover. I hit her helmet again, then her side, her shoulder, her arm, the fist she was using to throw a wild punch she swung at me. I pivoted away from her subsequent attempted kick, smacking her stomach at the same time, then I used both of my hands to shove her rising arm away before backhanding her across the visor once again.
I wasn’t doing heavy damage this way, and nothing that would get remotely close to actually knocking her down. But I was disorienting her. I was chipping away at the girl, stopping her from getting her bearings, hitting her over and over again with what amounted to light to moderate taps that still did just a little bit of damage. Bit by bit, I was actually making her stumble back.
But it wasn’t enough, not yet. I had to hit her even faster, give her even less time to recover. With a grunt, I poured it on as much as I could, hitting her over and over again, pushing this green-speed to the limits. It was a strain, enough that I could feel my form start to wobble a bit. I was pushing things so much in those few seconds that it wanted to shift back to my normal self.
So, I let it happen, shifting right back into my solid self before grabbing her shoulders to lever myself up and over her once more, twisting around in the process as though using a set of parallel bars. Pushing off her shoulders that way, I snapped my feet out to kick the girl in the middle of her upper back as hard as I could, rebounding off her as I spun into a backflip that sent me into the upper-right part of the pipe. My feet hit the wall/ceiling bit there first, my legs tucking so I could touch my hands against it as well. With my gravity-boots I would have been able to stay like that indefinitely, crouching mostly upside down. But I wasn’t interested in staying there any longer than it took for me to coat that part of the pipe with the usual green-blue for a quick bounce. That was standard enough. But at the same time, I also activated a new combination on myself, one that I hadn’t actually tried in a fight yet. I’d messed with it a little bit on my own, but never in a real situation. So why not do it right now, in the midst of this competition? YOLO and all that.
In this case, the paint combo that I triggered on both my legs were blue-green flames. Yeah, I did green-blue on the pipe itself. That was the one-second really strong bounce effect. But blue-green was something else entirely. First, I was sped up. Which, combined with the strong bounce off the wall, meant I was flying like a cannonball straight at the girl I had just knocked off balance by kicking off her back.
When I collided with Tumbleweed, the blue-green combo effect kicked in. Which, in this case, meant all that speed I had was instantly transferred over into the other girl. That was what the blue-green did, it ‘bounced’ the speed boost from where it started to whatever it hit. It might’ve seemed like a bad idea to make my opponent faster than me, but I had also just slammed into her, so she was sent flying. And with that speed boost, she flew much faster than she expected to. Faster than she could adjust for. She hit the opposite wall and rebounded off it even as I sent a shot of red at her back to yank her my way. Which, again, happened faster than she was expecting. As she hurtled backwards, I pivoted out of the way, activating purple stripes across my arms so I could grab her out of midair. By the time her brain had likely even registered that I had collided with her in the first place, or that she was moving, I had already thrown her to the floor. It basically amounted to catching her as she was yanked toward me, cancelling the red paint that had pulled her my way, and then giving her a hard shove downward.
The intercom was already announcing that I had two tackles now, making us both tied in here. The next point would win all the points in this tunnel.
Tumbles had recovered by then, bouncing back to her feet. She gave me a quick, exhilarated laugh before launching herself at me, determined to get that last tackle. The girl’s feet left the floor as she flew at me.
Aaaand then she froze. When I had collided with her in that impact that sent her flying and made her super-fast, I had also left a green-yellow star across her back. I activated it, completely freezing her in mid-air. It only lasted a second, but in that time, I leapt up, flipping over to land on her back. I was standing on top of her, hands pointed at the ground to shoot red paint that way, while covering my gloves with it as well. In the instant that her very momentary freeze wore off, I triggered both. I was immediately yanked downward. And, since my feet were planted on Tumbleweed’s back, she was shoved down in the process. Just like that, the woman faceplanted into the pipe floor.
“And there’s tackle three to Paintball!” Nqobile’s voice called out. “Paintball is awarded all of Tumbleweed’s forty points for an increase to ninety-six. He is also awarded another one hundred and twenty-four points for every ring inside the pipe!”
Her voice turned mischievous then. “Paintball’s current total stands at two hundred and twenty points. The question is, can he get all of that back to his arch before someone else steals them from him?”
The sides of the pipe opened up once more, even as I felt Tumbleweed stir under my feet, and saw Liqueguy coming in from one end while Split’s head and torso came from the other. All of them intent on getting to me to take my points away, while Nqobile’s voice echoed through the arena.
“Good luck, Paintball!”
Joke Tags: So Many Fells Back In Detroit Are Cheering For Paintball Right Now. Just Imagine Cuelebre Wearing A Giant Paintball Tee-Shirt And Waving An Avant-Guard Themed Foam Finger