Liberty/Abattoir II - Hell On Earth

As the cold, unyielding steel jammed up against an already-open wound, Abattoir probably should've been trying to remember if she was up to date on her tetanus shots. It was...possible? She didn't voluntarily go around AFW's medical staff too often, between their nagging about CTE and their bewildering fascination with trying to analyze something in her blood. It might've happened at some point, but she frequently had difficulty remembering things that weren't related to fighting.

None of this was really consciously processing, of course. At the moment, she had much bigger concerns, being as Liberty was still smashing her into the side of the cage, and even if she'd been free, she was furious well beyond the point of rationalizing anything.

Despite her efforts to get upright, it was obvious her opponent didn't intend to give her any time to recuperate - definitely a wise move, given Abattoir's durability and penchant for attempted maiming. Although the nak muay held onto the cage with a tenacity that would make Jose Aldo envious, Liberty finally managed to wrench her away from it, dragging her over by the stairs.

The first kick to the chest jarred her, the second woke her up, and the third re-focused her attentions.

Abattoir was on the dazed 'downslope', starting to steadily come out of it, and as Liberty focused her attentions on the stairs, the nak muay braced herself. She had a feeling the opportunity she'd weathered the storm for was about to show up.

It was kind of ironic in a way, or as close to the concept as Liberty cared to think on. With all the assorted weapons and bric-a-brac hanging around the ring during this hardcore match, one of the most dangerous objects was the one that would’ve been there regardless of the match type - the aluminum stairs.

They didn’t get used nearly enough in the AFW for Liberty’s refined tastes. They were perfect for her needs. Just light enough to be moved and used as a striking weapon, with a surface that was begging to have someone slammed down on top of it.

The latter was what Liberty had in mind. But first, she had to get Abattoir into position for it.

”Keep up, come on!” She gave Abattoir’s arm a vicious tug and pulled her over to the corner of the cell, right in front of the steel steps. The crowd, which had been growing muddled and confused by the carnage they were watching, started to become antsy once more - they were seeing what Liberty was seeing. They knew where this was going.

She confirmed their fears when she took the nak muay’s head and forced it between her legs, putting her into one of the most recognizable positions. With the steel stairs right in front of her, this was guaranteed to get nasty. And loud. And painful. And so many things that Liberty was looking forward to with unashamed glee.

She grabbed Abattoir around the waist, hoisted her up and onto her shoulders, started to move forward, and-

The thing about the ring stairs was that there was really only so much that could be done with them. Most of the roster didn't exactly have the upper body strength necessarily to swing those things around like chairs or kendo sticks - they were wide and hell of awkward to carry.

As such, Abattoir had a reasonably good idea of what would be coming once they got over by the steps - the only real mystery was what form it'd be coming in, and once Liberty started setting her up for the powerbomb, her intentions quickly became obvious. This was not something the nak muay could allow; taking a powerbomb in and of itself was a heavy blow, but taking one on the steps would be disastrous.

She had a half-second window, at best, to counter. It'd have to be perfectly timed.

The second she was upright - really, even before that, on her way up for the move - Abattoir slammed both elbows down onto the top of Liberty's head. It was a calculated blow, the kind that could momentarily daze a person even if it didn't inflict any serious damage. Hopefully it'd keep her distracted long enough for Abattoir to swing around to the side and twist into a very wide-angled headscissor takedown. It wasn't a straight-up rana (that would've ended up with Abattoir essentially powerbombing herself onto the stairs), but she was counting on it being enough to get her loose and throw Liberty severely off-balance.

”Oh, geez, oh geez…” While Abattoir and Liberty had been brawling at ringside, the referee had been  busy trying to figure out a way to exit the ring while avoiding as many thumbtacks as possible, since she wasn’t sure if her soles were thick enough to keep them away from her skin, and she had no intentions of finding out.

By the time she made it to the floor, she could see that the two madwoman she was locked in with were still well on their way to obliterating each other. ”Um, wait!” She waved to Liberty as she stepped over the broken piles of glass, hoping she could be a voice of reason. ”I know this is a hardcore match, but there’s, you know, a certain level of caution we should-”

Liberty wasn’t hearing it. She was already lifting Abattoir up, getting her high and preparing to turn this into one of the shortest Hell in a Cell matches in wrestling history. Luckily for the few audience members who weren’t getting a sick stomach from watching this match, it turned out to be not that simple.

The blows to her head hurt, but they weren’t all that bad in the context of things. She could’ve shaken them off in two seconds. Abattoir only need one to swings around in her favor, though.

Liberty wasn’t sure what happened, exactly, but she did make out a couple of things. For one, Abattoir had twisted around to do it, and for two, it involved sending her flying, which was a rare sight to see. The former hardcore champion was not a light woman in any sense of the word, and when she fell hard enough, there tended to be a lot of noise. This was no exception.

She landed on the steps upside with a hollow but resounding crash. All of the edges on the steps dug into her spine and hit the back of her head, and the fun didn’t stop there. Gravity took over and Liberty flopped off the stairs, rolled over, and wound up laying on her chest, groggily groaning on the floor.

She’d picked up a few more thumbtacks along the way, too. Liberty was too woozy to really notice.[/b]

Abattoir picked up way more than a few thumbtacks, seeing as she'd cast herself chest-first onto the floor.

There comes a point where, after the body has been pinpricked a thousand times by a thousand tiny points, the mind starts tuning out the sensation a bit.  It still hurts, but - particularly when you're also being blasted with metal-clad elbow shots and ground up against cages - a lot of the 'smaller' pains try to kind of blur together into white noise.  With most people, it becomes an issue of perspective, where they manage to re-prioritize their sensory input.

For Abattoir, it was different.  She focused on that background pain, brought it right to the forefront along with everything else.  It kept her focused.  Rather than let the agony dull her senses, she used it to bring everything into sharp, blindingly clear relief.

Sometimes all of the sensations had to be compartmentalized a bit, but Abattoir knew when to go zen and when to revel in it.  Despite the damage she'd taken, Liberty was certainly still dangerous - that powerbomb probably would've put an end to the match if it'd gone off properly.  Chances were...reasonably good that neither of them had the gas tank (or the capacity for blood) to keep the match going for marathon lengths.  It'd be a sprint to the finish for sure.

Which meant she'd better start sprinting.

One arm rushed off the front of her torso, knocking a bunch of tacks loose in a shower of stained gold, and the nak muay took a moment to glance at Liberty sprawled out over the steps.  There was a momentary swell from the crowd, who could clearly tell what she was thinking...but instead of rolling the whole contraption over and leaving her opponent under the steps for a doublestomp, Abattoir turned to grab the middle rope, pulled herself up to the apron...

...got a running start...

...and leapt off in a diving elbow drop aimed directly for Liberty and the stairs.  

The Market Crash.

It was a bit hard for Liberty to be sure - what with the countless pangs all over her body, the brain trauma, the aching bones that would likely be broken before this was all said and done - but, as she laid on her chest with her hazy eyes gazing out to the audience, she couldn’t help but notice that few, if any of them were actually leaving the arena.

They were horrified, they were voicing their disgust and disapproval, but this match was becoming a car crash in so many ways. They couldn’t turn away, no matter how much they wanted to.

Something about that made Liberty happy. What didn’t however, was the thing she when she turned over on the steps and saw Abattoir up above, on the apron, clearly poised to be leaping off soon. With her back so wrecked, the former champion couldn’t do much to avoid or counter whatever was coming her way, but the potential for incoming agony and certain injury wasn’t what was really grabbing her attention.

”Don’t you do it!” Abattoir broke into a run. ”Better not!” She threw out another toxic tocsin as her rival leapt off the apron.

Abattoir brought her elbow up in mid-flight, and that was when Liberty was sure: she was about to get hit with a Market Crash.

Her Market Crash. ”Fucking bitch!”

Abattoir didn’t quite have the weight or accouterments to deliver the Market Crash like Liberty could, but her being sandwiched on steel steps and having thumbtacks all over her chest did wonders for ramping up the pain. The attack didn’t just hit, it felt like it went through Liberty’s body, and that was how she reacted. She went flopping away as if Abattoir had been carrying electricity in her blow, rolling away until the cage stopped her travel. From there she just turned over to her chest and cradled it tightly, screaming and growling and spitting and cursing.

"Elbow drop off the apron onto the stairs" had seemed like a much better idea in Abattoir's head.

As it turned out, despite the deeply satisfying revenge of using Liberty's move against her, the actual move was very ill-advised. She'd basically crash-landed on the floor, sending a cloud of tacks and broken glass flying everywhere, and apart from her vicious glee there was not a lot about this situation that was particularly ideal at the moment.

Liberty was incapacitated for the moment, though, and so Abattoir had time to drag herself up to her feet, shake off, and try to refocus. So far she hadn't lost nearly as much blood as she'd normally have expected; the gash on her forehead was gushing pretty badly and would probably be an issue pretty soon, though. Chances were good the match would be relatively short, all things considered. They'd been going a hundred miles an hour right from the get-go and, if she got cut up any worse (which, to be realistic, she almost certainly would), it was really only a matter of time before Abattoir started to functionally bleed out like she had against Jessica.

Well, best to have fun while that time lasted, then.

Abattoir's breathing was deep and steady through her mask as she meandered over to the other side of the ring. She was clearly trying to preserve her energy - her cardio was solid, but particularly in a high-intensity match like this it was critical to manage the gas tank properly, so to speak. She took a moment to examine the plywood board sprawled on the floor, festooned with thorny coils of barbed wire, and then dragged it back over to the stairs and the thrashing, downed Liberty.

Whom she stepped over, pulled up to her knees, and promptly backhanded. Because of course she did.

"Still with me?"

Her own attack.

The bitch used her own attack.

Okay, Liberty really didn't have much room to cast stones, she could admit that. She had used Abattoir’s attack first, after all, and it was possible that her rival put the same amount of thought into it that she had. It was just an elbow drop. Lots of people used elbow drops.

...screw it, she knew what she did. And being a hypocrite didn't make Liberty any less pissed off about it. She’d gladly show Abattoir just how she felt, too. With her fists. And her boot. And a sledgehammer.

When she got to her feet, anyway. Which could take a while.

In the meantime, though, Abattoir looked to keep her entertained with more pain and potential mutilation.

She was still hugging her aching chest when Abattoir hauled her up, so she couldn’t do much in the way of resistance. Breathing alone was a big enough challenge at the moment, much less anything else.

When Abattoir slapped her, though, she felt obliged to do something back, though. So, she replied in her special way: looking up and spitting in the nak muay’s face. ”Go to hell.”

The combination of fury, urgency, and sheer bloodlust was starting to wear a little on that discipline on which Abattoir prided herself so much.

It was inevitable, really.  She came into these things with a measure of cold-blooded focus - more so now that she seemed to have a coherent (by her standards) vision of what she wanted to accomplish - but she tended to get excited, and as more and more factors contributed to that excitement, her focus started to waver and she began to take increasingly bigger and bigger risks.  They were now at that point, and this was where the danger was greatest.

Abattoir grinned, running the back of a glove over her mask and smearing Liberty's blood and spit down the side.  "Been there."

She hoisted the other girl to her feet, threading an arm through her legs.

"It didn't take."

The attempted wrist-clutch exploder onto the barbed wire board was one of those aforementioned 'bigger risks'.  Abattoir was a bit smaller than Liberty and, while she had considerable leverage-based strength, was at something of a disadvantage when it came to sheer brute force.  Trying to hurl the bigger girl over her head and into the spiderweb of wiring had the potential for a big payoff, but she was putting an awful lot of her chips on her ability to power through the move.

It was a little bit hard to tell thanks to the fakafka mask Abattoir had on, but she could’ve sworn the red-eyed wrestler was smiling. Fucking evil bitch.

Liberty didn’t have an idea just how evil Abattoir could get, though, until she reached between her legs, and she looked over the nak muay’s shoulder to see a strategically placed board of barbwire.

At first, there was some disbelief. Abattoir was a solid competitor, Liberty couldn’t take that away from her, and she was probably stronger than about 90% of the women in the AFW, but even so, she wasn’t exactly what you’d call a ‘power wrestler’. Liberty had, at least, twenty pounds over her, and that was some solid weight. Abattoir couldn’t lift her up, much less hit her with a damn suplex.

Then she did it, sent Liberty’s bulky body flying, and that disbelief turned into sheer shock.

10,000 heads in the arena and many more across the world turned away in unison as Liberty came hurtling onto the brutal barbwire, letting out a feral screech right after the impact. This was worse than the thumbtacks. As much as they sucked, they just went into her skin and stayed there. They didn’t dig into her skin, didn’t shred it, didn’t stick and bite with every move she made like some vicious dog gnawing on her back.

The barbwire did all of that and more, as it stuck to her skin and clothes when Liberty tried to roll over it, stubbornly catching onto her and prolonging the pain. For now, all she could do was wallow in her agony and bury her face into the mat, hoping she’d get a chance to repay Abattoir before she bled out.