“The Ulthuan Invitational!

You can practically feel Shindahl shaking as he enters the pitch. The legendary skink has only one goal left - and this is the closest he has ever been. "COACH!!" he shrieks "WE NEED TO WIN!"

And so Shrieking Bloodstorm play the blood game. With a heap of good dice, particularly on the armor rolls, the lizards slowly make their way up the field. Admittedly, the first turn is a bit scary, as Shindahl, receiving, snake eyes the ball pickup, and its nice and close to the LoS, so the elves have a chance to steal it right off the bat. But while the elves can get to the ball and even pick it up, they fail the hand off to get it to safety. Shindahl darts in, and immediately finds himself surrounded by massive bruiser Saurii. The rest of the half is a slow grind, despite some successful leaps to put elven guards on Shindahl, the followup leaps aren't successful. Bloodstorm keeps the ball, KO'ing dark elves every few turns; and a few nameless skinks get banned along the way.

The half ends 1-0, with 2 skinks banned, 2 dark elves (out of 4 KOs) still sleeping, and 2 dark elves in the injury box.

Now its Giging in the Darks turn. They line 'em up, and knock em down, both Krrrronk and the two Saurii supporting him on the LoS. But Shrieking Bloodstorm retaliates by badly hurting a rookie lineelf. And from there the half is set. The dark elves are wedged tight against one sideline (as more elves and a skink have been removed), outnumbered 10-8, with a diving tackle skink covering the leaping agi 5 blodgestepper carrying the ball. Elven ingenuity kicks in, and almost the entire dark elf team switches to the other side; the ball carrier easily leaps away from Kazzee to pass the ball to a player but one square from the opposite sideline! Shindahl is also assaulted during this play by yet another mighty blow tackler - but his days of surviving tackle pombers in CRP hold true, and his armor doesn't even break.

Then Shrieking Bloodstorm resets; they too switch most of their team down into the middle, covering almost all the elves (admittedly, a few are dodge elves with no tackle on them, so 'cover' isn't the best phrase), but no saurus blitzes. Instead, Shindahl jumps up, races 11 squares, and puts an assist on the ball carrier so far away - and then Ziaslees, the stat freak abomination skink races 12 squares to blitz the blodger! But, he only gets a push - putting the ball carrier up against Sceral, the biggest Saurus on the team.

No dice. Giging regroups again, gets a faint screen, and KO's Ziaslees. No Saurus can easily get at the ball.. except the blodging breaktackler, who takes down the ball - and badly misplaces it, forcing Shindahl to make multiple dodges past a tackle elf. But Shindahl doesn't care, makes 4 dodges, picks up the ball, gfi's 3 times, and again hides behind the massive Sceral.

One last dark elf attempts to blitz Shindahl - but using the last Giging in the Dark re-roll to successfully GFI, he gets double pushes, and can't take the legend down. He does have tackle and strip ball though, so the ball is loose, but its safe between Saurus feet. And Shindahl picks it up again - and flees flees flees across the pitch to safety for a 2-0 win.

Thank you for the match blackGigio!”