SS 17 Entropy Title - Valley Doll (c) vs. Alicia Welles (Total Victory Match)

Valley was on her knees, sucking in air to her tortured lungs, wondering just how better of an outcome her jump had given her. Her ribs were saved, but her innards had taken the brunt of the punishment. She swore she was on the verge of throwing up, could feel it rising up from her gut,  but she was thankfully able to keep it down and avoid the most embarrassing moment of her AFW career.

Deep breaths, in out, suck it in, cough. The audience was starting to get subdued, the worst sort of response she could get from them. No doubt there was a growing sense of inevitability, that Alicia was just dissecting her. Some people even called out and booed Alicia for pressing the advantage.

They were pitying her. That almost hurt worse than the Body Avalanche. She’d come too far, worked too hard, to be the object of anyone’s pity. She flatly refused, and she would show that refusal by grabbing the ropes, pulling her way up-

-only to get kicked in the face. How quaint.

That one landed right on the chin and made Valley’s teeth nick her tongue, giving it a neat cut along the side. Blood trickled over her tongue, thick and iron, registering as she slump to her chest and flopped on the mat. Not the best look, being honest.

Now that she was set on her course, Alicia was as relentless as anyone might have expected her to be. Certainly, she wasn’t paying any attention to the booing, but even she was aware of the gathering hush among the watching fans. Aware and uncaring.

Still, for all that they were seemingly in sight of the end already, Alicia was still not ready to draw down the curtain. She’d neutered Valley’s leg, crushed her ribs and likely bruised her innards. And yet the blonde still was trying to get up, even after that kick. And that meant she had to pile on still further until the bell sounded and the match was done.

To that end, the big redhead didn’t let up. Stooping, she went to heft Valley up and to her feet. For one, she needed her standing. For another, while she didn’t need her standing for long, she needed her to be in a slightly different place. Thus, she went to pull the blonde up bodily and then spin her around and out of the corner, keeping her upright just long to go for another hard kneeshot to Valley’s already abused belly.

It was the sort of hit calculated to lift the blonde off her feet if it landed, Alicia’s knee looking to bury itself in her belly button.

It was going to net her still more boos but, honestly, everyone knew how much the big redhead cared for audience reactions.

Valley wasn’t easy to lift up, nor did she care to be. Partly because she wanted Alicia to expend effort to get her standing, even if it wasn’t much, and partly because she was still trying to remember what planet she was on after that crazy kick to the chin.

Of course, she couldn’t stop it from happening. She couldn’t stop Alicia from doing much, that was the problem. Her style relied on taking advantage of openings, but Alicia gave her so precious few that, when they finally arrived, she was hardly in a state to take advantage of them. It was the whole ‘best defense is a good offense’ maxim, slamming her in the face.

Alicia didn’t just lift her up, though - she actually moved her around, repositioned. A curious thing to do, since the Scissor Queen was usually content to strike her whenever, wherever. Before Valley could process that factoid, however, she had more important matters to focus on. Like the knee that has became lodged in her gut.

It lifted Valley up, then brought her low, dropping her to her hands and knees, leaving her prostrate in front of Alicia, her face buried into the mat.

Yes, this match was officially starting to get boring. It was time to draw it to a conclusion, before her disappointment at the second round outweighed her delight in the first.

The kick to the chin had left Valley clearly dazed and her leg was still equally clearly not fully functional. And, say what you like about Alicia Wells, she was not usually actively sadistic in the ring. There were exceptions but Valley Doll was not one of them.

Still, there was no reason to take shortcuts while she was still in the ring.

Coldly, efficiently, Alicia brought one leg up and then pistoned it down, going to stomp Valley into the mat again.

A second blow would follow shortly, this one aimed at the ribs in an attempt to get the blonde to roll onto her back and into position.

With that, once she’d got her blonde – and, let’s face it, at this point Alicia could do almost anything to Valley Doll that she cared to – into position, the curvy kickboxer backed up, ducked through the ropes and started to ascend the turnbuckle.

Here was another familiar favourite from the first time she and Valley Doll had officially tangled. And this time, Alicia’s legs were in considerably better nick and Valley Doll’s ribs…

Weren’t.

It wouldn’t take long for her to ascend and then the match would be over barring a miracle on an epic scale.

Valley could see the referee looking on with clear concern, obviously weighing some hard choices. She didn’t blame her, really - if anything, she appreciated the concern. Too many of the AFW referees didn’t care what happened to their wrestlers, standing idly by while anything and everything happened to them. This one looked like she would stop the match if it came to too serious a point, wanting to save one of the AFW’s stars. Made sense.

Valley wouldn’t let that happen, though. She was going to get up. Was going to fight back. Was going to win.

Somehow. She’d been considering ways to make that happen for a few moments now, when she noticed something odd: three whole seconds had passed without Alicia attacking her. On top of that, the audience was making a noise of rising anticipation, the same sound they made whenever Valley prepared to climb the ropes and launched for a highflying attack. But that couldn't have been right, Alicia didn’t have a high-risk bone in her body, except…

”Oh,” She looked up, just in time to see Alicia mounting the second rung. ”Oh, nuts.”

A phantom pain arose in Valley’s chest, the bitter memory of what happened the last time Alicia had took flight. It ended in a brutal stomp that felt like a saber being plunged into her chest, the sort of move that would mean a certain end. She had to put a stop to this immediately  - and, if she was just lucky enough, she could turn it to her advantage.

She waited until Alicia had just reached the top of the turnbuckle, and that was when she sprung into action. She summoned her reserves and pulled up to her feet fast, grasping the rope as she rose. Using them for the support her aching leg couldn’t provide, she pulled her body up and swung her leg with a wide, sweeping kick, aiming for the back Alicia’s knee, looking to knock her forward for a rough sit up top. From there...

All credit to Valley, Alicia had not been lingering over her ascent. She wasn’t ascending at high-flyer speed but nor had she taken a second more than she’d needed. So it was pretty impressive that, after the battering she’d taken, the blonde had made it to her feet and over to the corner and thrown that kick all in the time it took for her to get from the second rope to the top.

A kick that, it was fair to say, wasn’t exactly Valley’s best. And yet it was destined to have a much greater effect than if Valley had thrown it at almost any other part of the redhead’s Amazonian physique.

By pretty much every conceivable metric, Alicia’s legs trumped Valley’s. They were longer. They were thicker with muscle, particularly in the thighs but her calves were bigger too. In terms of both application of force and resilience, there was just no contest.

However, there were some pesky physical limits that any legs had to operate under. Like the need for joints, say the ankles and knees. Joints which, however hard you worked the rest of your legs, however solid and muscular they were, remained chinks in the armour.

So when, somehow, Valley’s foot collided with the back of the redhead’s knee, the results were inevitable and decidedly impressive. Caught thoroughly off-guard and out of position, the big Brit found herself taking an unexpected seat on the top turnbuckle – her grunt of pain demonstrating that it was not a comfortable one in the slightest!

For a moment at least, Alicia was stuck in place, perched in a very dangerous position as she tried to both deal with the pain and work out how to disentangle herself quickly.

Valley couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a crowd make such a drastic change in no time at all. One moment, they are dismayed, distressed and even disinterested. The next, they were on their feet, screaming, jumping, about to riot. You could almost feel the shift in the air, like the entire arena was trembling with anticipation.

They could see it,  they could feel it, they could taste it. This was Valley’s chance, and she wasn’t going to let it slip. In fact, she had the glimmer of a good idea, but before she could start on it, she needed to get Alicia into a very particular position: the tree of woe.

”Excuse me.” Valley reached underneath Alicia and quickly crossed her ankles together. An innocuous movement by itself, until you added what came immediately after: Valley jumped up, grabbed the Briton’s head in a three-quarter facelock, and dropped down into a sit, slamming the back of her head against her shoulder with a neckbreaker, looking to leave her senseless and upside down.

Phase 1. Phase 2 would only get nastier.

Alicia was pretty good at dealing with pain. You had to be, in her chosen profession, or things were not going to go well for you. So, while not top of the class, her pain tolerance was above average. It was all about compartmentalising it, fighting past it. The trick was that took time, particularly when the pain was sudden, unexpected and unfamiliar – all adjectives that nicely fitted this scenario.

Plus she was not given much if any time. Seconds, if that. Instead, as she started to move with the intent of disentangling herself, the redhead felt Valley’s hands grab at her feet. Tensed for some sort of submission, albeit what she had no idea, she was thoroughly confused both by the polite comment and by the way she found her legs crossed at the ankles.

Huh?

No, really, what was that about?

Her chance to think it through, or undo it because if Valley wanted it then it was likely a bad idea, came to an abrupt end almost immediately courtesy of her head being spiked onto Valley’s shoulder – the already painful neckbreaker hideously augmented by both gravity and the distance the blonde was going to drop. Alicia’s mind went blank for a horrible moment.

And, when she woke a heartbeat later, it was to find herself staring at the ring from a perspective that was unmistakeably upside down.

With the entirety of her body available to Valley, because her legs were now trapped. It took her no time to realise what had happened, but also that there was almost nothing she could do about it. Her ankles, which she could have normally uncrossed with no trouble at all, were pulled tight with her weight behind them. She couldn’t untangle them if she tried, short of sitting up and taking the weight off them.

Alicia could do that, easily. She could sit up, grab the ropes and untangle her feet. She just had the odd sensation through the foggy blanket that dulled her thoughts that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Despite that, the redhead was struggling to free herself. Because that was all she could do at this point. So she was doing it.

Futile or not.

That worked.

That even worked better than Valley had envisioned it working in the five or so seconds Valley had taken to come up with this ‘plan’. The neckbreaker was a relatively mundane wrestling move, something you were bound to see at least once if you watch two matches in a row, and she’d underestimated just how effective the blow would be on a burly bruiser like Alicia.

The blow seemed to throw her for a loop, which was good, because that gave Valley the time she desperately needed to crawl her way back up the ropes and get standing again, aiding her still numb, but rapidly improving leg. The crowd egged her on, clapping as she rose, but this was one of the rare times she didn’t acknowledge them. There were more pressing matters than fanservice at the moment.

Like, for instance, keeping Alicia from freeing herself. The woman and powerful legs, but she wasn’t exactly weak on the upper body, and under normal circumstances it would be difficult for Valley to stop her from doing anything. Under these, though, she had options.

The option she chose involved grabbing the ropes and putting her boot down on Alicia’s neck, using her weight to keep the bigger woman down and choke her at the same time. One of the meaner routes, but she was in that kind of mood, ”Stay...down!”

And, as she’s sort of expected, Alicia’s attempt to free herself came to a premature end.

Because, whatever someone might think about Valley Doll, the blonde veteran wasn’t stupid. She had to know this was her best – if not only – chance to turn this one around.

So the redhead hadn’t even begun to sit up when she found herself choking, a white boot pressed firmly against her throat in a way calculated to negatively impact her ability to breathe. Or, in layman’s terms, Valley was throttling her with her foot.

As a matter of instinct, Alicia’s hands snatched at the intruding shoe, doing her utmost to pull it or twist it away from her neck.

Somewhere, she was dimly aware of a third presence, of the referee’s voice beginning a count, but it didn’t really register.

Nor did Valley’s remark, not that the redhead would have bothered replying even if she had been able to do so.

After a short bout of futile prying, Alicia pulled an arm back and went to smack a punch right into the leg she’d been squeezing not all that long ago. The angle was stupidly bad, her ability to do any damage probably nil, but she was hoping that a fist to the bruised area of the thigh would convince Valley to back off enough to let her breathe again.

No, she really wasn’t aware that the ref would have been breaking the hold any second anyway.