For moment there is nothing other than Öde's breaths, still hot with the anger and the rush it left behind in his body. Then it came, a response, a sound, a scream.

Öde smiles; the movement is slow and deliberate as muscles pull taut the line of his lips, wrinkling the corners of his dark mouth into something darker. Like a wolf which grins just before it delivers the killing blow, so Öde looks as he turns to face the owner of the shrieking, all haughty and full of youthful arrogance. It's more than just that though. Öde is full of nothing except that, as though all other sensations have bled out of him. They must have, the day he fell in the caves, the day he embraced his mother's last breath, the day he prayed to a twisted god.

Öde saunters too casually though. He thinks too much of himself when so little has been tested. As he turns, he faces not the pitiful, battered body of a defeated warrior, but the hulking form of a bull which has set his horns into an aligned path. Too near, too fast, too furious with due cause, Rostislav comes at Öde like a creature truly born of this earthen domain and the war it just witnessed. Öde blinks, red, and then the color is all over him.

An indignant squeal thunders from the boy's maw as his body leaps away, triggered by the terrible slicing of meat and muscle. It is the answer he has been looking for, but not the way he wanted it. Rage instantly fills all the spaces left inside his body, spilling over his thoughts the same way his fluids drench down his shoulder. "Fucking SHIT!" Öde rasps, toes dancing easily on the grassy knolls of the Falls, first away, then towards.

His own head bows, exhales coming in heavy snorts that align with heartbeat. He thrusts himself off his right side, the strong side, aiming to throw himself left and towards Rostislav where his triple horns can impale the loser's hide. That Rostislav has risen up, above him, bulkier than him, doesn't seem to phase the green boy dressed in black and red. He thinks he has the power to simply run into Rostislav, trampling him with hoof and horn alike. So he throws all of himself at the stallion, because he cannot comprehend any other outcome.

That Rostislav has drawn first blood is unforgivable, and for that, Öde will make him perish. This is the fight he had been looking for. This is the fight he needs.