Ruinous Expedition [Vocado, Vennel]

Cheri usually prided herself on her situational awareness, on always knowing where everything was at any given time. At this point of her expertise, she loathed to ever not know exactly everything about everything going on about her. The current situation, had she some time to think on it clearly, would have frustrated her massively, as it became increasingly difficult to focus on anything except the blood coming up her throat like it had legs and her stomach which, at this point, seemed less like noodles or sausages and more like mince or custard.

Where was Vocado, anyway? She couldn’t be sure of his exact location, for even when she looked straight at him her eyes tended to form a few ghostly images of him, around him, rotating confusingly. What she did know, though, was that he was charging up an attack… something big. Either that, or he’d already fired it and had somehow missed entirely which, fair enough, he seemed the sort for it. Cheri was not entirely sure if that noise was Vocado screaming or tinnitus… probably both.

She thought to everything back home she could come back if she were to survive this… that did not motivate her all that much. She didn’t have much in her life; no family, only her careers as a general, a politician and a public figure, so none of that motivated her in the direct sense. But, when she remembered the people she was fighting for: a student with that burning hope deep inside, a mother who would give anything to ensure the survival of her daughter, anyone like who she ought to have been. She thought of them, she thought of a billion of them, whose lives have been irrevocably made worse by idiots like these. That motivated her to stand, for now and forever.

”Oh yeah?” Cheri’s head snapped up in an instant to meet Vennel’s gaze, a slight smile upon her face, droplets of blood falling from the middle of her brow to the cheek below her one working eye. ”Just what did you think you could do against a child of Plant?”

As Vennel charged towards her, Cheri quickly formed a sort of mortar-shotgun upon her shoulder and shot it, not at Vennel, but at the ground she was about to move over, flinging destron-defiled asphalt and smoke into the air, hopefully compromising her vision enough for it to hopefully be a bit more surprising when Cheri would catch Vennel’s kicking legs, smash her downwards by them and, when she was smashed flat against the ruined ground, Cheri would quickly form a long silver and pink dagger in her left hand and, providing everything went as intended, would stab it straight into Vennel’s gut.
That was one sentence, and it deserved to be one sentence.

”Home-field advantage, bitch.”

This wasn’t just any ordinary dagger, either. Provided it got deep enough in, it would release a pink poison from its diagonal pores which would flow through the body and continually, ever-so-painfully turn the body’s systems against itself.

"I expect you to die!"

”You expect too much.”

The crane claw plan worked, funnily enough, allowing Cheri some space. Unfortunately, that gave Vennel some space as well, and too much time, with which she took the opportunity to retrieve a stimpack and use it. To contrast, in Cheri’s moment of peace, the ridiculous amounts of adrenaline she’d been feeling all fight had very slightly subside, allowing a torrent of pain to take its place as she was almost sent to the ground again and very nearly threw up some more blood. Turns out, yeah, gut still hurt like hell.

She didn’t seem to respond to Vennel’s not-entirely-thought-out promise. Indeed, Cheri’s facial expression was a bit dull, a bit numb and rather pained, betraying the thoroughly terrible day she’s been having. This kept up, all until the saiyan charged at her, at which point she was spurred into action. The pain was really starting to set in now, though, to the point that moving was agony, so instead a scatter shot blaster— like a shotgun, but cool— appeared on her shoulder and would continually fire pink shots at Vennel so long as she was close. Were Vennel to ever get too close for comfort, Cheri would actively attempt to deflect, to nimble her way out or use a quick forcefield. In the end, the full nelson would never come to be…

”You caught me once... don’t expect it to ever happen again.”