Just one of those days....[HUNT, Open to two]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stmtOlm7jFo

The first thing Sky became aware of as he came to consciousness was the crushing weight of depression. He usually did a good job of holding back the immense tide, but there were days where he could do nothing to stop it. He had managed to keep it at bay for so long since coming to Syne, he had made the mistake of thinking that, while not gone, it had become much more manageable. He snorted softly. He laid with it for a moment, his eyes closed, the sounds of nature and academy life filtering in softly through the cracked window. He turned his head to the side and cracked an eye open staring out at the clear blue sky with an empty soul. He closed his eyes again, sighed.

Forcing himself to get up, Sky sits up in bed and swings his legs over the side languidly. He dresses with a mechanical efficiency, pulling on his pants, shirt, socks and shoes and his sweater, finally strapping on his belt. As he picks up Wind and then Rain from their place on the wall he feels a slight stirring up of happiness in his Soul, but alas it was crushed mercilessly under the weight of the ocean. His fingers dully strap on his blades and he stumbles out of his room. What a sight he must be, the thought vaguely crossed his mind. Stumbling down the corridor, a blank and listless, somewhat pained look on his face, faraway stare in his eyes, his hair disheveled and his clothes ruffled, the usual pep in his step not only missing but replaced by an awkward gait. Not that he cared about any of that at this moment anyways. As he stumbled down the hallway, he forced himself to appraise the depths.

As expected, there was the crushing guilt he felt over the loss of his childhood team. Iris, Grey, Leon... He comes to a halt in the hallway as he doubles over with almost physical pain, using a hand on the wall to stabilize himself as the images of his friends dead, mangled bodies superimposed upon their smiling, laughing faces paraded across his vision... Whispering voices marched into his ears as those passing by him in the hallways commented amongst themselves, none of them caring enough to ask a stranger if he was OK. Good, a harsh voice whispered in his mind, the voice of his depression. Right now, he cared not for the concern of strangers, what he wanted was his friends back...

However, there was more to it than the loss of his friends, he realized with dull surprise. Nay, mixed in, and even overwhelming his guilt was a nameless void of sadness that seemed to fill his soul with lead, making his feet slow and his mind blank. The volume of whispers had grown so he forced himself to move. He didn't know where he was going, wouldn't know until he got there. He didn't get twenty feet before a mental vision hit him like a two ton bag'o'bricks. Valory's face, always so open and clear; to see it convoluted by pity, disgust and not a bit of fear, directed at HIM! It was why he had broken contact with everybody, why he had fled to this Academy in the middle of nowhere. A Grimm slaughtering of his friends was one thing, to come back home afterwards to find that his girlfriend held him responsible in the same manner he did for himself? That was too much.

With an iron will he didn't even know he could muster in this state, he blocked that image and forced himself to move again, telling himself it'd be better when he got outside. It wasn't, if anything it was worse. The sounds of nature going on around him, of excited and happy students filling their lives with cherished memories... He foun himself walking towards the Finnek Forest. ]Wait! a small voice warned him of going outside the academy in such a condition. With Depression hanging over him, not only are his actions slowed and his body heavy, but Grimm would invariably flock to him. He ignore this voice, feeling a grim satisfaction that he might find his end. Even as he kept walking he felt a dull horror at this last feeling, but did not change his direction.

He stepped through the gate and didn't look back.

The contents of the backpack rattled lightly as Solomon cinched up the last of the straps holding the small bundle together. The whole pack bulged somewhat, in irregular shapes, but to his right hand, it felt as light as a feather, lighter even, in fact he wouldn't have known he was holding something if he'd been unable to see the burlap straps looped over the hardy black leather of his dress glove. Still, the way he handled that back, a burlap pack that bore the wear and material as well as the no-nonsense unadorned functionality of military influences, made it seem very heavy, and perhaps delicate.

Really it was anything but. A folded blanket, a kettle, various implements for the preparation and serving of tea, and a few tiny bundles of dried leaves and powders, and some snacks, hardly constituted anything rare or noteworthy, but in a way that was nearly ritualistic, everything had been prepared just so, to a degree of care and precision that was noteworthy in itself even if the objects of that were not. Anyone who was not personally familiar with the young man, a looming shape in a fine blue waistcoat, punctuated between the shoulders with an intricately embroidered stylization of Remnant's broken moon, might have said he simply planned to go on a picnic, and while that was not a peculiar way for a student to spend their morning on a day when all their classes fell after lunch, it was certainly not something that one might readily expect of an individual with a background as storied and violent as his own. From an eyepatch that obscured much of the right side of his face, to a severe expression as grim and fixed as a halloween mask, to a body that was hardened and marked by dedication to the arts of combat, Solomon Moon hardly looked like the picnicking sort, but there he was, preparing his bundle of teas and snacks with the same discipline and care that being raised in the martially dominated society of Atlas, and a family known across the known world for a long history of great generals and warriors to boot, had afforded nearly every procedure which he undertook. Discipline was not simply a trait for Sol, it was a feature defining to nearly every aspect of his existence.

Laid out with the care of a uniform awaiting the inspection of an especially fussy drill sergeant, even Solomon's casual wear bore the splendor of a well maintained set of Atlesian fatigues. In fact, were he expecting to attend class in the near future, he would have actually been wearing the optional Syne uniform, albeit with the addition of a grey Atlas waistcoat and white dress gloves, because as far as he was concerned, the provision of a uniform excluded the option of wearing anything else for that purpose, but as it was he treated his mundane attire with as much anal attention to detail as any seasoned veteran might afford an officer's garb. The already noted blue waistcoat, which fell past his hips with a pair of square flaring tales, as well as the dark blue dress shirt beneath, and the black slacks upon his legs, was pressed free of even the suggestion of wrinkles, perfectly tailored to match and define the majesty of his powerful physique, and made of the finest materials available in Atlas, while his steel reinforced dress boots were shined to dark reflective sheen, as were the brass buttons that lined his coat, and it was not merely a dedication to form that compelled such precision, but rather an inability to even see anything less as an option. Such was the result of growing up adhering unerringly to military doctrine and procedure.

He tugged the leather glove more securely upon his right hand, and then with a ruby studded cuff-link he secured the cuff of his dress shirt tightly around his wrist, locking the glove in place and eliminating the possibility of anyone glimpsing what lay beneath. The glove looked bulky and awkward, and upon close inspection was actually a size larger than that upon his other hand, in fact, the entire sleeve and shoulder of his right arm was reinforced in several spots, and complete with a leather paldron that bore the symbol of his family, a sigil his house had kept since a time when such emblems were actually relevant, the same that was splayed across his back.

With a grunt, he turned to regard the full length mirror in which he could see his made up bed, as well as his laid out uniform for the afternoon, and finally himself, and Solomon nodded to the one eyed stranger that looked back at him.

With that he was off, making his way towards Finnek forest, marching in lock step as if on parade.

Easily the largest of their kind to have been seen in recent times, a pack of Boatbatusks in a sense ruled this particular part of Finnek Forests. Numerous times this group of Boarbatusks have laid waste to nearby settlements just outside of the forest as well as slaying any human or fauness who foolishly entered their territory. With each successful raid or attack, the Boarbatusks only grew in confidence. Soon, their confidence began to lead their destructive efforts further and further from the edge of the forest, closer to Bellmuse City.

As the Boarbatusks were leaving their territory for another raid, they spotted a couple of students from Syne Academy, Sky and Solomon. Of course they spotted the students from a distance aways, and actually had no knowledge of them being hunters in training nor really had much of a visual on the gear they carried. Only thing that was clear to these massive Boarbatusks was that these two were their prey.

Both Sky and Solomon were a distance away from each other, and as such, it seemed as though they hadn't really made contact with each other yet, a strong advantage the Boarbatusks were able to identify. They intended to keep it that way.

Charging out of the forest towards the middle ground between Sky and Solomon, the Boarbatusks squealed with a terrifying battle cry. They were confident.

Moving to the area between Sky and Solomon, the pack of Boarbatusks split up. Boarbatusk 1 and Boarbatusk 2 changed direction, both of them charging for Sky. As they did, they continued to move apart. Boarbatusk 1 rounded Sky's left side from a distance, then charged at him, dropping it's front horns as it did. Boarbatusk 2 did the opposite and rounded Sky's right side, charging with it's front horns lowered. Boarbatusk 1 and Boarbatusk 2 intended to catch Sky in the center of their tusks, crushing him with a pincer attack.

Alone, Boarbatusk 3 charged at Solomon. With no allying teammate, there wasn't much in tactics the Boarbatusk could use. As such, it attacked with a frontal charge, lowering it's front horns intending to run over Solomon.

Damage:

Important Info:

Almost immediately, Grimm responded to his depressive state, two huge boarbatusks charging out of the forest, their thickly muscled bodies rippling as the shrilled their battlecry. Dimly, his Huntsman training registered that against Grimm this big, his swords would do little more than tickle the soulless monster. There were three of them, at first, but they split up, two of them charging at sky while the other charged off in the other direction. The two coming after him split up so that they were coming at him in a pincer technique. Though the full weight of Skys depression was upon him so that he honestly couldn't care less if he died or not, there was a stubborn tenacity at the very basis of his Soul that refused to be snuffed out, refused to give in. This spark, he suddenly marveled at even as it caused him to sink into a crouch and jump straight up at the last second, bringing his legs up just in time as the two Grimm crashed together with a huge bang. he tried igniting some sparks under his feet to jump away, but he could not get a grasp on his own soul, such was the depth of his depression. However, that spark, tiny as it was, still refused to give up. Sky fled from the darkness and dove into that indomitable flicker, fanned it with his need and his breath and his life. It caught, grew as the fire rose like a wildfire, consuming and purging, coursing out of his hands and into his swords as he drew them as the raw electricity that was his Soul made manifest. As he reached the top of the arc his jump had sent him into, he angled his body with the arc so that his feet rose so he was laying in the air, at the same time rolling over. He jabbed his swords together at boarbatusk1as he descended, the electricity now full fledged lightning bolts that lanced out through the air with a crackle and the smell of burnt ozone from the crossed tips of his sword. Flickering twin sparks into existence underneath his feet, they disappeared with a burst of light as he jumped off of them with a backflip.

[-30 AP, 20 damage to Boarbatusk 1]

The foliage rustled lightly beneath the heels of his polished jack boots, the laces of which rose past his ankles and mid way up his shins beneath greaves of burnished steel that reflected broken shafts of early morning sun as they fell through the canopy overhead, creating a field of dancing sprites that seemed to march down the path ahead of him. Sol was not well accustomed to the kind of warmth and vibrancy that surrounded him, and the mesmerizing capering of the twinkling only served to heighten the contrast between this place and his home of Atlas.

Atlas was a cold place, In the literal sense, having very brief warm seasons and spending much of the year blanketed in snow on account of the elevation, as well as smothered beneath grey clouds year round on account of being framed on all sides by the frigid oceans, and in the figurative sense as well, being that military influence was present in nearly every aspect of the culture. In Atlas, formerly the Kingdom of Mantle, education, media, and even the fine arts all served the military, and as far as the nation's ideology was concerned it was often a toss up between diehard loyalty to martial ideals, or diehard loyalty to martial edifice. Needless to say, this was not an environment that readily bred compassion or sympathy. Naturally this invested most Atlesians with a sense of pragmatism that was not as much a matter of selfishness as it was understanding that the individual was responsible for their own standard of living, and that those who did not enjoy a stable lifestyle must certainly have only themselves to blame for some undetermined shortfalling. It was a well understood, if somewhat ironically classified, "truth" among Atlesians that charity in any form was ultimately a disservice to the individual receiving it, because one did not forge a strong weapon by softening the smith's hammer.

The Finnek forest certainly deserved a more descriptive name, as it stood replete with the scents of the forest, the bitter smell of coniferous mixing with the musk of mulch and the sweet tang of green foliage and ultrachromatic flora, as well as the singing of countless splendidly colored birds in every shape, clashing with the anti-melodious squawking of gulls and other scavengers and occasionally the distant cry of a hawk or eagle, not to mention the veritable rainbow of greens, and earth tones, as well as the cerulean blue of the sky glimpsed past pillars of golden sunlight as it poured like mana from heaven through a dense canopy of back-lit greens and yellows which were so far from the muted whites and greys of Atlas, that they burned Sol's eye. To the contrary of his vivid surroundings, the only word that could come close to describing Solomon's mood was "bleak".

This was not to imply that he was morose, or self pitying, or even sad, because at least any of those descriptors might have suggested a texture or taciturnity of his mood, when really Sol felt very little of any of that. He felt like a blank canvas, whose only variation to tell that anything was even there was the grain of the sheet stretched across the easel, or an endless field of snow dunes stretch so far into a horizon hidden by the simliarity it shared with the rolling clouds overhead.

Like a clockwork soldier, it was nothing but habit and a predetermined and singularly unknowable mechanism that had brought him out here with a tea kettle.

The young lord had often shared tea with his father in the seemingly infinitely distant innocence of his youth, and over time the it had become ritual to the point that it had given him comfort even when he undertook the journey alone. However, over time it had lost that soothing quality, but had also become so much a habit that Sol persisted in the act even after it neared a point where the associations might actually have become harmful to him.

Unfortunately, he desperately needed that long lost relief now. His first day at Syne had been marked by two violent altercations, one leaving a faunus hospitalized and another leaving Sol's roommate with a broken arm, not to mention his own arm being damaged in the process, and while both fools had earned their fate, things had not improved since then. Every day seemed to invite another potential disaster, and every word uttered by potentially well-intentioned strangers never failed to strike the bundle of nerves the resided in the one eyed youth's broad chest. Pursuit of that lost pleasure, that safe place that was likely burred in a grave somewhere beside the first man Solomon had ever killed, was the only thing he could think of to help him come to grips with his new environment, to give him the stability he needed to make it here. It was not as if he ever entertained the thought of talking to someone, literally anyone, about the many demons that assailed him on a daily, hourly even, basis. After all, any Atlesian would tell you, to do so would have been too much like requesting charity, and Sol was as Atlesian as the came.

He realized as he walked that his right fist was clenched shut so hard that the stitching along the outside of his thumb had burst, and he gave a sigh as he paused to examine the damage. He poked his fingertip into the hole and touched the solid appendage beneath before he realized something else was amiss. Sol, accustomed as he was to the silence of snow drifts, had not noticed it at first how silent the forest seemed to be around him. Surely the trees had been alive with the calls of birds a moment ago, and he scowled as he tried to remember the last time he heard the sound of a feathered beast, only to realize that he'd been wrapped up so tightly in his own concerns that he could not be certain that he'd ever heard the birds.

Instinctively, his left hand fell to the empty space beside his left hip wear he had worn a sword since just after his fourteenth birthday, and his scowl deepened.

He did not see the grimm approaching, being that it came from slightly off to his right as he had his head turned to examine the empty space which would have been a sword before he came to Syne, and thus fell squarely within the blind-spot that was a result of his missing right eye, though to call the eye missing might have been a tad generous, being that Sol not only knew where the eye was, having removed it personally, but also had gone so long without that it could hardly be said that he missed having two eyes. It was mildly inconveinient at times, but a man who relied entirely upon sight did not last long on a battelfield, and the screaming squeal that tore free from the boar's maw like the screeching of some massive but poorly maintained engine of war, as well as the literally earthshaking rumble of it's advance, was more than enough for Sol to not only judge it's position and distance, but also time his escape.

He turned sharply on his left heel, away from the incoming barbed bulk of the massive pig, and towards the trunk of a nearby tree that was as wide as his own waist. As he spun, his right arm cocked back like that of a primed trebuchet, before unloading in a full length cross punch that turned half the width of the bough into a cloud of splinters as he took a step towards the left of the boar's path.

The tree groaned as if in pain, or perhaps resignation, as the last of the remaining trunk buckled beneath the weight of what still remained above it, and with the sound of splintering lumber it pitched down upon the charging beast's armor plated skull with enough force to cave in the roof of a mid sized family sedan. Wasting not a neuton of the momentum that had carried his fist through the tree, Sol stepped only wide enough of the toppling trunk to put himself clear of it's mass, but not enough so to give the boar any reason to divert from it's current course, counting on the single minded simplicity of the beast's motives to keep it on course with the incoming hammer of towering timber and trusting that the eventual impact would parry the beast's charge, whilst timing his repost to coincide the moment when the pig would be momentarily pinned beneath the stunning impact as well as the weight of the fallen timber. Boarbatusks had infamously dense skulls, and even had the tree been made out of machine steel it likely would not stun the beast for long, and it would already be trying to get its hooves back beneath it's weight as Sol closed in. It didn't matter though, a moment of confusion was all Solomon needed.

There was a brief moment as their gazes met, and in a tail of a typical hero it would have been a moment of shared mutual respect between man and beast, of perhaps understanding or sympathy, but as gold met crimson, it was merely the gazes of two remorseless killers momentarily happening upon each other, united by nothing but the savage animosity each felt for the other, and a joyless, merciless, instinct driven assault.

Still spinning, and fist still trailing the blasted debris of the unfortunate tree, Sol stepped back towards the boar and plunged his fist towards the creature's bulging red eye, seeking out he only vulnerable point on the mammoth's entire head. Anticipating the sinking of his arm sank up to the elbow in the jelly and blood and shattered sinus, and the gigantic pig's squeals of agony as it tried to thrash itself clear of the log, or to gore the one who had just half blinded it, Sol prepared the coup de grace of his strike in advanced as the firing mechanism hidden beneath his sleeve primed to unleash a sustained jet of molten fire dust directly into the monstrous beast's horrible skull. Meanwhile his aura, an effervescent inverted cascade of molten red fading into smokey blue that coated him briefly across the exposed surface of his body, was drawn towards the inevitable point of impact as if iron filings towards a lodestone, the manifestation of his soul a physical force of destruction ready to detonate the fire dust even as it was already trapped within the ruined flesh of the beast's soon to be stricken left eye.
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Attack 1
Called Shot on the Boar's Left Eye Socket using Tier 1 Weaponized Prosthesis
4 Str x 5 + 10
30 DMG
Attack 2
Called Shot to the interior of the the Boar's Left Eye Socket using Tier 1 Fire Dust
5 Spt x 5 + 10
35 DMG
Attack 3
Further Called Shot to the interior of the the Boar's Left Eye Socket using Tier 1 Fire Dust
5 Spt x 5 + 10
35 DMG
Utilization of Semblance, upon Tier 1 Fire Dust within the Boar's Left Eye Socket
-20 AP = 20 DMG

Total
120 DMG