If no one does it for a while, I'll do it.

 

November 13, 1941

It was a cold, miserable dawn and men and goblins had been dying for hours.

Twelve thousand undead had overrun part of Moscow’s layered defences under the cover of darkness. Groups of dark wizards had supported the zombies, all of them bearing Grindelwald’s mark on their breast. The defensive lines had shattered like a nut that had been struck by a hammer, leaving a gaping hole that the enemy had poured through. After a Red Army counterattack was eaten it looked like the entire defence would collapse and Moscow would be lost to the Wehrmacht armies that were drawing a noose around the city.

Then in a rainbow of light Albus Dumbledore had arrived, bringing a regiment of goblins and their auxiliary companies. Over a thousand goblins had advanced behind massive shields that were held aloft by mountain trolls, wielding rods that fired jets of burning light and fire at awesome rates and swords made from the finest goblin steel while their artillery launched orbs of dragon-fire overhead, setting the night aflame and driving back the darkness. Whole swathes of the battlefield became a raging inferno that consumed hundreds of zombies. Squadrons of wizards dressed in the bright gold and pure white of Gringotts’ auxiliaries held the flanks, forcing the zombies back with judicious use of fire and killing the dark wizards.

The battle had been raging for hours before the sun rose. Thousands of zombies fell like wheat before a scythe and the corpses of scores of goblins, wizards and trolls marked the line of advance. There were always more zombies though. Portals from the Nevernever appeared over the battlefield at random, disgorging dozens or hundreds of zombies in seconds before they closed. Any attempt to enter the Nevernever was blocked from the other side.

High above the battle on an enchanted carpet, Albus Dumbledore watched and waited, tracking the movement of forces and the appearance and disappearance of portals. He saw one wizard in unmarked robes fling ice and force from his hands, killing half a squadron of goblin auxiliaries before being overwhelmed and killed. He stayed dead.

Another apprentice – I knew the White Council hadn’t killed all of Kemmler’s apprentices in Poland. Where is the master though? Concern gnawed at Dumbledore, making him feel vaguely nauseous. If the goblins’ losses kept mounting they would withdrew and the International Confederation of Wizards was too heavily engaged in Spain to support the Red Army while the remnants of the three Russian Ministries were either fully engaged elsewhere or cowering under the protection of the Imperial Court in China. This needs to end now.

Clever charm-work made his eyesight sharper than usual and granted him phenomenal peripheral vision, allowing him to see far more of the battlefield than any unaugmented human could. It was a panorama of death and destruction laid out before him and his chest tightened, his heart aching with the sadness of it.

Oh, Gellert, you fool!

He had little time to dwell on his onetime friend’s madness. A spike of pale blue fire no thicker than the wand in Dumbledore’s hand struck the carpet, setting the rear portion aflame. Dumbledore angled the burning carpet downwards as it began to shudder uncontrollably, narrowing avoiding a second burst of fire. He coughed and his eyes began to water and a cloud of noxious smoke engulfed him, obscuring his vision.

Dumbledore could feel a furious heat through the soles of his boots and without looking he swept his wand at the flames in a backhanded motion even as he struggled to control his descent. There was a whining, sucking sound as the oxygen was pulled from the flames, suffocating them. It was too late though. Even as the flames sputtered and died the carpet became unresponsive, the enchantment dying.

It fell away from Dumbledore and the wizard found himself falling through the sky, his stomach lurching with the sudden acceleration. His mind was clear though and his wand was still grasped in his hand. He flicked his wand just once and his descent slowed instantly, allowing him to pull himself upright and step towards the ground as though descending a set of stairs.

He peered at Heinrich Kemmler through the veil that was concealing him as he stepped lightly onto the ground. Kemmler was a tall man, of a height with Dumbledore, and clean shaven with short iron grey hair. His face was unmarked by age.

“Albus Dumbledore,” Kemmler greeted in German, his words carrying to Dumbledore despite the roar of the battle. He held a slender staff that was covered in runes and glyphs but was otherwise unarmed. “I’ve felt you in my shadow for months now. It was you who led the White Council to my apprentices in Poland, wasn’t it? And you commanded the assault against my army in Uman last July. You die today, boy.”

He rapped the ground lightly with his staff and dark purple light spilled from the sigils. The ground trembled and cracked beneath Dumbledore’s feet. He jumped forward with a nimbleness that belied his greying beard as the muddy ground fell away for a metre in every direction beneath him. A high pitched whistle emerged from the hole, like wind through a tunnel.

Perched precariously on the edge of the hole with his heel dangling over the abyss Dumbledore flicked-and-twisted his wand as Kemmler raised his hand, gathering a pool of grey-white magic in his palm. An invisible hand snatched the necromancer from his feet and flung him through the air. The staff tumbled from his grasp, flying several metres away from him, as Kemmler tumbled through the mud.

Dumbledore took a step forward and stamped his foot, causing the ground to collapse into the hole, leaving a deep, steep sided hole. He stabbed his wand at Kemmler as the necromancer rose to his knees, seemingly unharmed apart from the globs of mud that clung to him. A violet bolt streaked from the wand, buzzing as it flew through the air. Kemmler thrust his right hand forward, his fingers splayed, and a disc of shimmering magic sprung into being an inch from his hand.

The curse slammed into the shield and exploded in a shower of shining violet light that made Kemmler flinch backwards violently and slip on the mud, falling on his arse. He flung a hand at Dumbledore as he fell, conjuring a fan of crimson lightning that leapt from his fingers towards the younger wizard.

Dumbledore disapparated from the lightning’s path, letting it hit an already destroyed anti-tank gun, and reappeared behind Kemmler as he called a gust of wind to retrieve his staff. A flick of Dumbledore’s wand froze it in mid-air as it started to spin through the air towards Kemmler.

“Gravitas!” The hand Kemmler had stretched out to catch the staff curled into a fist and Dumbledore found himself pushed face first into the mud as a great weight settled over him. He struggled against it but his bones creaked in protest and he could barely move his wand.

Kemmler rose to his feet and turned to face Dumbledore. The schoolteacher craned his neck upwards with some difficulty so he could see the necromancer’s face. His hand twitched, shooting ineffectual sparks from his wand as he tried to conjure a counter-spell to the great weight that was pressing him into the mud.

There was a flash of fire in the air between them as Kemmler’s hands came up to deliver the killing spell. Fawkes hovered between them, his crimson and gold plumage made brighter by the lifeless landscape. His beck yawned widely and the unearthly phoenix song echoed across the landscape, clear and pure.

Kemmler roared in agony as the song pierced his body, driving a dagger into his soul. His concentration broke as he clasped his hands over his ears, trying futilely to drown out the music. The killing spell he had been conjuring disappeared in a burst of smoke and Dumbledore found that the weight pressing him into the mud wasn’t as great as it was before Fawkes’ arrival as Kemmler struggled to maintain it.

Dumbledore laboriously swept his wand through the air, pushing mud into his face. There was a burst of blue light and the weight abruptly disappeared, leaving him free to scramble to his feet even as Kemmler flung a blast of force that Fawkes nimbly dodged.

Dumbledore twirled his wand and the anti-tank gun that Kemmler’s lightning had scorched convulsed and twisted, becoming a lean bodied hound with a mouth full of sharp metal teeth. It charged Kemmler as he pushed his hands outward, enveloping himself in a cone of silence that produced a low pitched hum.

A slew of curses burst from Dumbledore’s wand as Kemmler turned to face him, forcing him to conjure his shield to weather the assault. The steel dog darted around the shield faster than Kemmler could manipulate it and lunged for him with snapping teeth. There was a flash of light as Kemmler touched a band around his left wrist and he caught the hound with his bare hands, matching its prodigious strength with his own.

Dumbledore stooped and stabbed his wand into the mud while Kemmler wrestled the hound. The mud behind Kemmler churned and a misshapen head appeared, followed by shoulders and then strong hands that grasped at the mud. The golem was not unlike the one Dumbledore had seen in Prague years earlier.

It pulled itself from the mud and lumbered towards Kemmler as he tore the hound’s head off of its body through sheer, brute strength. It punched him as he dropped the decapitated hound and turned to face Dumbledore, sending him crashing to the ground. He rolled desperately, avoiding the golem’s stomping feet and a curse from Dumbledore that blew a hole in the ground.

Fawkes swooped for Kemmler, grabbing his robes in his talons. The phoenix started to effortlessly lift the necromancer into the air. Kemmler grasped Fawkes’ foot and the phoenix screamed as black lines shot through its plumage. Kemmler screamed as Fawkes burst into flames, burning his hand. He fell, hitting the ground hard, and his right leg snapped.

The golem started moving towards him again as he struggled to pull himself into a sitting position. He screamed as Dumbledore ripped his stomach open with a purple curse. Sobbing in pain he grasped at the air as blood pooled in his lap and Dumbledore swept his wand into the air for his next curse. The air was torn open and amethyst light spilled from the hole, bathing Kemmler in its glow. He dragged himself through the hole and into the Nevernever as Dumbledore’s curse tore into the mud.

The portal closed, leaving Dumbledore standing alone on the battlefield. He turned, scanning the battlefield, and spotted dozens of undead being driven towards him by the goblins.

“So much to do,” he muttered, as Fawkes settled on his shoulder and the golem took up station at his side. He walked towards the fighting.

<><>​

This is crap but I'm not going to spend the effort needed to make it good. If anyone else wants to have a go at the challenge feel free.

 

In case anyone cares I answered the Voldemort vs Cowl duel here.

 

Peace, thanks for answering the challenge. I'll agree with your assessment about the main part of the duel, though I liked the introduction, especially the image of Dumbledore appearing with an army of goblins in a rainbow of light.

 

So, I've got a challenge for anyone: Harry Dresden vs Marvel's SHIELD.

I'd hoped to bug Roarian about it, but he's only read half the DF books, so I'll have to settle and throw it out here, if anyone's interested.

 

Well I just blitzed through this whole thread in a couple of hours. It's been too long since I've written anything and this could throw me back into the swing of things. I write Naruto and HP almost exclusively, though I have a good grasp of the SW Universe as far as the six movies go.

Toss me a fight if you find it intriguing.

EDIT: although that Bond vs Hunt one looks promising...

 

When you say SHIELD, are we talking the organisation or the characters from Agents of SHIELD?

 

Hashirama Senju vs Hiruzen Sarutobi(on his prime)

 

So are we talking God!Hashirama from the manga these days or a more reasonable version that, y'know, makes sense?

 

Challenge:
The Cyberman Invasion (Doomsday) Vs. Hogwarts; the DA specifically.

 

Only God!Hashirama can take on Sarutobi at his prime.

Make it happen, Inert.

 

The Organization. Not all of them at once, obviously, but the 'Big Boss' battle would be with Nick Fury and his top agents.

 

Hmm. I don't know much about SHIELD in the comics, but I still might have a crack at this, unless anyone else has a more concrete idea about what they'd do with it.

 

Finally making some in-roads into the White vs N challenge. Probably not going to explode like the Red vs Naruto challenge, and I'm still feeling out her personality, but I'm finally feeling confident that I've got N's solid after my past few attempts at sympathetic; ruthless; and misunderstood.

Spoiler

He's a psychopath.

 

Nihilistic Ideals devouring the Truth
Act I - Evil be thou name.
​

The moment the Shadow Triad vanished, Touko White began to realize the nature of the trap she had just willingly walked into. Darkness loomed from every corner, trying to swallow the light of her Emboar's flames. She almost wished it would; blood lay across the granite no matter where she turned, setting her heart to racing. Cooling crimson, dark red, blotchy brown, the stuff was everywhere, etched into the floor like the sigils from the old TCG energy cards, all dark, fighting, fire emblems with no discernible pattern to their placement. Rising up the walls in vast whorls and smaller spirals stemming from the center, like raindrops from a storm, surrounding what she took to be an assortment of the legendaries in lieu of any eyes. A dark droplet splashed down just inches from her cap, dashing itself across her toes, and she resisted the urge to scream.

Instead she took a shallow breath and directed Emboar's flames higher despite knowing what likely awaited. The overbearing warthog snuffled and bunched up his shoulders, spewing a torrent of light that confirmed her regret; hung upon the unlit chandeliers were two unfamiliar women, one with pale pink hair, the other glossy blond. They were... she had to turn her face away, unwilling to commit their deaths to words. Yet still those words came. Burned, butchered, crucified. Her stomach roiled fit to unleash everything she had ever eaten and she knew she couldn't stay there any longer beneath their murdered corpses.

"Hurry," she exhaled the word and took a measured, controlled step through the lifeblood upon the floor, exacting every ounce of steadiness she had learned from the past six months afield with monsters. Unspoken, she feared the real monster waited ahead - a Zoroark born in, and craving, human flesh.

[=][=][=]

It took over an hour to ascend the halls and stairwells creeping to the top of the forsaken castle, and a good portion of that had been in full sprint just to outpace the death-wails of dying grunts pinned up in darkened rooms to each side of her path. She hadn't dared stop to look, or to try and relieve them of their agonies - the accursed melody they sang would be with her the rest of her life already, along with the visage burned into her memory of those two women. She had no desire to take any more into her nightmares.

Her partner kept apace with a steady thump of his hooves and none of the trouble that burdened her own lungs, leaving her gasping for breath by the time they had reached the final wing. The very end was illuminated by an ethereal light, unnaturally silent, and she recalled her starter with reluctance - she had no intention to give N warning. She had enough idea of how he would react.

The shadows swallowed her whole, but for the simmering glow from Emboar's pokéball over her right hip. She could practically feel the psychic malignance pervading the air and wrapping about her form. Hurry, she thought with a shiver, but do not let him hear. Oh kami, don't let him hear.

Every footstep seemed to burden the silence, threatening it with a knife's edge. Her heart continued to race for the small eternity between that last stair-step and the illuminated hall beckoning her within. It only thumped harder in her chest by the time she was close enough to peer through the light.

And she froze clutching at the doorway.

N crouched in the middle of his throne room, idly swirling his fingers through the cold pool of Alder's blood like a child finger-painting a mural. The deceased-Champion was as gruesomely executed as had been the two women, and more, for the fact that he had been discarded in the gutted corpse of his beloved firebug, Volcarona. Those once magnificent wings it had borne lay shredded everywhere around them, discarded quills used to write with its master's blood for a short time. There was little flesh left to Alder himself, either, and what was she could not stand to look upon for long.

A shiver racked her spine, cold sweat dripping from her pores. This... this is what I have to face? Her foe was not a trainer, though by League definitions he was its current Champion and master of laws. How can a murderer control our region? How could Alder have lost? The faintest hope that the old man had been enough to put N down withered and died. Her legs threatened to buckle and she drew a shaky breath, holding tight to the edges of the door frame lest she collapse all together. Nothing had ever scared her half so bad as the time spent in this tortured hell, not even Celestial Tower filled with so many ghosts.

Celestial Tower had been heaven by comparison.

She managed to drag her eyes away from his form lest he feel her gaze and look up from his macabre art. The four Lampent lighting up N's gruesome play swung on silent, ethereal purple links chained into the ceiling. Behind his tattered golden throne her eyes kept creeping toward an imminent black darkness more portent than any other shadow, swallowing up the light of their ghostly flames without relent. There was something inherently... eldritch about it, on a scale grander than anything else taken in that night, that made her heart skip a beat once, twice.

Emboar's pokéball blazed hot against her hip with impatience. The sudden heat snapped her gaze down to the device and the faintest shine of red-yellow light as her starter urged her on.

I... her eyes tracked to the others hanging on her belt then, cool serenity radiating from Mienshao, slow stubbornness from Bouffalant, even Accelgor's usual implacable mood stirring toward frustration. She could feel the bug's eyes glaring at her, challenging her, and the same of Scrafty. Lilligant was the only member of her team who felt as scared as she, and the plant masked that behind a nervous smile. The feelings they felt rang clear in her mind, if not her heart - fight. Win.

Touko drew another shaky breath, afraid to speak the words that would draw his attention even so. This was so far beyond anything she had ever confronted... no feral had scared her this badly. Those, at least, she knew how to react to; they were expected to be wild, to be beasts intent on eating any human who neared, who fumbled, who failed to hold their own. A hundred years of trials and tribulations had taught mankind how to stand upon its own two legs again by taming the worst of that savageness and beating it back at its own game. All her life she had spent learning the lessons of her ancestors, in preparation for that constant struggle.

But how do you confront a psychopath? A murmur on the back of her mind flickered soft as light in response, a voice she hadn't heard for years and hadn't expected to remember ever again. Black? She thought.

You treat him like a legendary, Black's voice whispered faintly. You don't even the odds... you set them in your favor. You strike the first blow, no matter how vicious. Never relent. She breathed slowly, feeling some measure of strength seeping into her spine at that iron-hard tone. Never relent. "Never relent," she whispered in agreement, clenching her starter's pokéball all the harder.

Heat burned the underside of her palm, tempering the emotion through pain. Touko bared her teeth and threw herself forward, flung Emboar into the high, vaulted room amidst the swinging Lampent, and before the warthog had even finished solidifying from crimson poképower she had slung out Scrafty, and Bouffalant as well.

For all that N still reacted quicker.

One moment his eyes were flat, empty, the glassy-eyed glaze of a dead man mimicking the living. The next they went up like the twin wicks of a jaded flame, scorching, terrible to behold, a demonic specter returned from the grave. Something fey, something utterly zealous entrenched itself in his bloody features, shaping lips into a cold hard grin, cheekbones standing out.

And all he did was utter one sentence, broken into two. "Zekrom," he uttered in laced amusement. "Play."

[=][=][=]

Yo, I'ma real happy for your White vs N pitched horror story, but this intermission point is the best point of all time! All time!


~1350 words for the first part. Next section is coming later, just want a start to this so I can begin concentrating on Zeel's/Jon's update next.
​

 

I love you.

 

Lol, blame the four leaf clover image board for this, but here's a question:

Who would win in a fight, Uchiha Sasuke or the Incredible Hulk?

And yes, that can be interpreted as an open challenge.

 

Great Cthulhu?

 

How do you want your Sasuke? In paste form, or little pieces?

 

That's cheating. That's like saying Nyarlathotep or Dagon. Yes, I like reading things too

I prefer my food either in liquid or in solid form, paste is in that neutral, suspicious area between the two states of matter.