Diablo rumbles to a halt and looks around the new clearing he has made, his jaws open a little as he pants from the exertion. His wounded hind foot throbs painfully, but he is pleased to see that the forest around him has come off far worse. It was worth it, he decides. Snapped, splintered tree trunks lay all around him and a mass of smashed-apart branches carpeted the whole area, all thoroughly torn apart and trampled deep into the soft ground. He looks down and sees a smear of blood splattered under one of his feet. With a satisfied rumble, he lifts the massive limb and searches the ground beneath it for the body of his foolish little victim. He hadn’t felt the familiar crunch and warm squish, but then he had been so busy smashing stuff it was probably no wonder. But nothing was there. Just leaves and muddy branches.

He snorts and puts his foot back down, then a stab of sharp pain streaks up his leg and he realises that the blood is his own; it was seeping out of his wounded clawfoot, thanks to the rex rampage. Carefully he shifts his weight onto that foot, testing it. It hurts and makes him cross so he lifts it up again. For a few seconds he stands there on one leg, looking around the clearing and wondering what to do; then he hears a snapping and rustling of leaves from a few yards to his left, and a shriek slices through the noise of the moving debris. He puts his foot down and crunches over to finish off his prey, limping slightly and wondering how much pain the human must be in to make a noise like that.

Diablo towers over the broken foliage, peering down into it. He must have trampled over the creature at least once after all that. He was expecting to see crushed bones and a crumpled posture. He was expecting the scent of fresh mammal blood and maybe a little weak twitching so as to make the final kill feel more meaningful. What he wasn’t expecting was to have a fully formed, freshly healed velociraptor burst out of the ground at high speed and violently attach itself to his face. Raptor scent fills his nostrils, Raptor screech fills his head and the shocked rex rears back and shakes his head about, instinctively screwing his eyes closed as he feels claws digging painfully in around his scaly muzzle.

If Diablo had been familiar with the Alien movies, he would probably have clamped his jaws shut to make sure no parasitic organisms were thrust down his throat to settle somewhere inside him and then burst rudely out of his chest after a few days of suspenseful gestation. But he wasn’t, so he springs open his massive maw, tearing his lower jaw free from Zed’s grip and does his utmost to sink several dozen huge, creamy-white teeth into his new attacker.

As Zed’s foot claws are ripped out of Diablo’s chin, the raptor reflexively hugs himself to the huge scaly snout, scrabbling his legs about to try and get them out of range of the suddenly snapping jaws. Diablo feels a small tail thwacking against the side of his muzzle and something warm and wet trickles down his chin. Surprise becomes rage and he roars in fury, violently shaking his head about in a determined effort to fling this obscene creature from him and smash it into a tree.

The G force generated by the swinging, lunging, head-banging T-Rex is substantial, but Zed manages to haul his flailing legs in and nimbly dig his foot claws into Diablo’s upper muzzle, keeping himself firmly attached. Still blind through choice, Diablo doesn’t want to open his eyes and expose them to the raptor’s claws, knowing that one of these could easily blind him. The big rex decides against running around until he smashes headfirst into a tree, so instead he uses his short range gripping tool to try and dislodge the raptor.

A huge, hot, wet something slaps up against Zed’s back, touching his legs and directing hot breath up around them. It snakes about and feels him, then quickly begins to curl around the raptor’s waist, coating him in saliva.

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Once again Diablo is disinclined to comply. The scratches and clawed kicks impact painfully against his battle-scarred snout and he snorts in determination, gripping his dexterous tongue firmly around Zed’s middle and pulling down against him with alarming strength. As he strains to yank the screeching saur off his muzzle, dug-in claws scratch and tear at his sensitive facial scales and he lets out pained grunt after grunt. The flavour of the raptor fills his maw, adding to his blind determination. He begins shaking his head violently up and down and this movement, coupled with the tugging tongue quickly yields results. With a furious snarl the rex rips Zed off his muzzle and quickly pulls the struggling raptor into his jaws.

Diablo prises open his eyes and is relieved to find them both still intact, but blood obscures one. The front of his muzzle was burning with pain and understandably so. One eyeridge has received a deep gash from which blood trickles down behind his eye, seeping into the corner of the large yellow orb and messing with his vision until he blinks it away. His snout bears six long slashes from Zed’s gripping fore claws, and his muzzle tip, lower jaw and scaly lips are a mass of cuts and scratches. The trickles of dark blood merge together here and there, running down the rex’s pale underside like war paint. Diablo is not a happy dinosaur.

Which is probably only fair, because Zed most likely isn’t either. Intense heat suddenly surrounds the raptor as he is forcibly hauled between the jaws of the much larger reptilian predator. The rex’s huge tongue slides off him and a multitude of lethally sharp and powerful teeth clamp against him, piercing his body in numerous places, but curiously (from a standard T-Rex battle tactics point of view), not punching straight through him.

Diablo feels grim satisfaction as warm blood seeps into his maw. Its taste is deeply enticing, and the wild, constricted struggling between his jaws makes him fight to withhold a rumble of heartfelt satisfaction. His urge to crunch down on the infuriating little creature is almost overwhelming, but anger overrides his instinct. He didn’t want to kill it straight away. He had had a really bad day with stabs in his neck, branches crashing on his back, an exhausting chase and rampage in a dense forest, and now his face stung like crazy and he had probably lost his human thanks to this raptor! He was going to make it suffer.

The tyrannosaur stretches his neck to the side, then with a deafening, savage roar he swings his head, flinging the tasty dinosaur through the air to the other side of the clearing, where it lands and rolls in the broken vegetation. Diablo growls deeply and limps off in pursuit.

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Diablo swallows down the pleasant raptor taste and narrows his eyes as he sees Zed roll over at the other side of the clearing and start to crawl away. He quickens his pace, ignoring the stinging pain in his clawfoot and breaks into a trot. The raptor obviously wasn’t going to outrun him, but the thought of it scurrying away into obscurity under all the vegetation irritated him. He had already lost one tasty bipedal snack that way and he was damned if he would lose another.

Diablo is, of course, the Spanish for Devil, so ironically enough he was probably damned whether or not Zed escaped into the undergrowth, which he did.

An exasperated snort rolls forth from Diablo’s snout and he bounds forwards as he sees the front half of his intended prey vanish down into the carpet of broken trees. But this is as far as the raptor gets before his hips snag between two branches and wedge him inconveniently upside down, leaving his hind half almost comically exposed above the ground, his legs kicking and his tail writhing about like a dropped hosepipe under high pressure.

The rex slows to a halt and pads over to Zed, feeling a smile tug at his stinging muzzle. With casual interest he lowers his head and examines the wedged raptor at his feet, watching its wild struggling with interest. He tilts his head to the side and peers down into the smashed vegetation around the small flailing body. Where was he hoping to go? Even if he managed to slip down beside the tree there was nowhere to escape to from there. Diablo could easily climb on top and trample him to death under the heavy branches. The rex lifts a massive hind paw and decides to press Zed down into his intended hidey hole to demonstrate this, but then he realises that this would just make fishing out his tasty prize more difficult once he had finished his demonstrating. He pauses for a moment in thought. No, he was going to keep it out of the vegetation from now on. Carefully, he brings his foot forward and lowers it a little, pushing the pads of his viciously clawed toes to Zed’s vertical back and feeling the raptor tense and go momentarily still against them. You know I could if I wanted to…

Diablo rumbles meaningfully and puts his clawfoot down, then goes slowly into a crouch and stretches his neck out, turning his head sideways so his scaled cheek brushes against the carpet of leaves. With a deep, malevolent growl, he reaches out and neatly takes the struggling raptor in his jaws again, pulling him free from between the branches with a little tug and straightening up to his full height.

Again the powerful instinct to bite down pounds at his mind, but Diablo dutifully resists it. There was no point in rushing a good thing. He allows his jaw muscles to clench a tiny bit, causing his teeth to teeth to sink slightly into the softer scales between them here and there, just enough to draw out a few more warm trickles of blood, which the rex slowly, deliberately laps up.

With a flip of his head, Diablo tosses Zed straight up into the air. He looks up and blinks blood from his eye again, taking careful aim at the airborne raptor before darting his neck out and catching it again in his huge jaws. The unavoidable impact over two rows of rex teeth is probably a highly painful and damaging one, but the blood-streaked, limping tyrannosaur isn’t in a very compassionate mood at the moment and he unhesitatingly flings Zed up again for another catch. Diablo repeats this a couple of times. He never bites down enough to crush the bones of his much smaller opponent, but the toothy impacts alone are enough to puncture and rip the raptor’s hide. With each catch, Diablo bites down a little and thoroughly runs his warm tongue over Zed’s back and underside, eagerly lapping any blood from the raptor before tossing him up again.

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Diablo feels irritation build up in him again as his neck begins to twinge painfully whenever he tosses Zed into the air. It was a shame. He was enjoying this game and he felt that it probably improved his mouth-eye coordination, which was a vital skill for any T-Rex. Multitasking, in contrast, is not a vital skill for a T-Rex – and most T-Rexes aren’t very good at it. So Diablo’s overall efficiency level drops steadily as things start to build up in his mind – the throwing and catching of Zed, the growing pain in the back of his neck and the question of what he should do about the pain. His eyes go slightly glazed as he struggles with this last one.

Conveniently for him, all three concerns are lifted from his mind as Zed nimbly lunges forward, altering his trajectory and landing with a soft flump over Diablo’s tilted snout. The bottleneck of mental information sorts itself out and Diablo comes back to his senses with a surprised growl. He sees a claw swipe wildly at his eye, catching his thick eyeridge before disappearing out of range behind his big saurian head as Zed slides down his neck.

Diablo roars angrily. It was all going wrong! He starts to curl his neck around to grab the raptor as he feels Zed hug firmly to the back of his hips, but a harsh pain stops him. He twists around and tries to bend his neck around the other way, but is stopped by the pain again. His neck was all messed up. Where was rex rage when you needed it? Diablo goes stiff and bucks up and down like a seesaw, feeling his already severely depleted energy vanishing fast. He would finish off this raptor if it killed him. He could feel its claws sticking into his sides, digging into the thick scales like annoying barbs.

He tries his tail instead. It was dexterous and nimble; being almost solid muscle, but he just couldn’t quite reach its own base and pluck the unwanted passenger off him. Diablo’s solid tail tip swings rhythmically back and forth towards Zed, curling right up and even managing to slap and poke the raptor occasionally, but never getting close enough to push underneath him or curl around him. A furious, breathy snort indicates Diablo’s displeasure at the situation, and the massive rex suddenly buckles dangerously underneath Zed.

There was no way that Diablo would allow something as green as a raptor remain on something as red as his tail base – they just didn’t match. The rex does the one remaining thing he can think of to remove his clingy little opponent without heaving himself back into the forest. He collapses onto his side with a massive ground-shaking WHUMP and twists his hips to the side, rolling himself right over from one flank to the other. The vegetation cracks and smashes and splinters under his seven tons of spread-out weight as he rolls relentlessly over the area, sprawling completely and looking bizarrely, energetically young and playful for a creature of his size and shape.

In fact, rolling about in this way is an extremely therapeutic and pleasurable experience for any T-Rex – it takes up a lot of energy, but it feels almost unbearably wonderful against the scales and it completely and utterly obliterates any itches that a rex might be suffering. Diablo rolls about like some possessed demolition machine, snuffling and grunting and steamrolling anything under him deep into the soft, trampled ground. If it wasn’t for the stinging pains he gets in his back, he might forget the aim of the exercise completely and just roll about for the pleasure of it. But with each movement, the rex feels snakes of pain sear through his massive body and this focuses his mind on one thing: blind, frenzied raptor crushing!

After a few hefty rolls this way and that, Diablo lifts a hind leg and throws the huge limb to one side, rolling himself neatly onto his front again with the momentum. He pushes up into a crouch and looks around the flattened broken floor of his rolling patch. The scent of blood was everywhere, but most of it smelled like his own. He peers around for signs of movement and listens intently. The raptor had better not have eluded him again or there would be trouble. He noses down at a broken branch and huffs some breath from his nostrils, sending leaves scattering.

----------------

((We're all done here, Timanth. We've decided to hold the fighting for a bit until judging is done, then finish this off with a post by whoever wins.))

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(Thanks for a really fun fight, Zed!  I don't think I'll be able to start any more rounds though, Timanth - my workload is going to rocket in the next couple of weeks )

A heaving breath catches Diablo’s attention and the hulking rex shuffles backwards a couple of careful steps, dipping his head to investigate. A surge of satisfaction flows through him and sweeps away the pain of his battle wounds like puffs of smoke in a breeze. There, lying pressed deep into the trampled ground is his raptory opponent, twitching slightly and looking panicked, bloody and generally displeased with the situation. The tyrannosaur pushes himself up into a standing position and rumbles deeply, his yellow eyes roaming all over the contorted body at his huge clawed feet. Based on the crumpled posture of the smaller dinosaur he must have scored several direct hits with his frenzied rolling, even though he hadn’t heard of felt anything to indicate this. As much as it is possible for a T-Rex to do so, Diablo smiles. His large fangs poke out from between his scaled lips even more than usual and his eyes narrow in malicious pleasure.

The thought crosses his mind that he shouldn’t waste a good meal, but he doesn’t like the idea of digging his prey out of the mud before eating it, so instead he just steps forward and puts a foot on Zed to finish the raptor off. There was still a human to find out there in the wreckage, he remembers. That would be good enough until he got out of this stupid forest and found some bigger prey to hunt on the plains. Diablo looks down and begins stomping heavily on the small dinosaur, pumping his powerful hind limb rhythmically up and down until he feels hot wet splashes against his sole pads with each pounding, crunching impact.

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