A flash of lightning splits the air in fractal patterns of furious arcing electricity. It bursts across the sky, violent and fleeting, and for a single moment bursts brighter than the broken reactor this place had called a sun. Then it rips apart, as lightning always does, and plunges the crumbling ruins into darkness. A figure looms above the scene playing down in the mud and the alley; coiling, tensing, watching with golden-eyed intensity. There is a pause of exactly one half-second's silence. The thunderclap that follows is deafening. For one brief instant, you would be forgiven for thinking the horrible weapon of the King to be a child's toy by comparison.
These are not signs of victory. Zeus does not storm when she is happy. Jas'o crows and digs and needles, he asks favors and makes offerings and forgets that all his power and authority is borrowed and overdue to be returned. Perhaps he imagines that today is a sign he is destined to stride atop his Admiral and his Empress both. But he has forgotten his nature. It is not the place of tools or hounds to dream of such grand prizes. It is the brightest bonfire that burns down first. It is the tip of the spear that chips before the shaft. Unseen above the fray, Bella hunches forward.
And she leaps.
Bella is a living missile. She drops through the wet air like a knife, and just like a knife she twists herself to inflict the highest amount of pain. Her back arches like a rainbow and her shoulder curls to bring her right arm up behind her, bent at the elbow and all her claws extended, tense and quivering with anticipation. Her hip rocks back and her legs spread apart as though she was bounding off of the raindrops, the better to put her body's full weight and power into her strike. Her bells sing dully, drowned out by the storm, by taunts, and by justice. The chain on her collar writhes and slithers behind her with all the fury of a viper defending its nest.
Her first slash is vicious: it tears angry red lines from the base of Jas'o's neck and down his spine all the way to his left knee. Bella lands with a crash and a hiss, dragged down to all fours by the weight of her blow. She rolls on her feet and springs off of her hand without a moment's hesitation and whips her body around in a full circle so that her chain coils itself around that freshly opened knee. She springs all the way up to standing as if the muddy street had rejected her, and wraps her hands around the chain.
Her face twists into a wicked sneer, and she yanks the links up toward her neck so that they twist tight around Jas'o's leg and pull him off his feet to land with a wet thud right next to the princess. He bursts back up with a howl and a vicious backhand, but Bella rolls with the blow and takes his back. In a second she's crushed his quiver, and with it his hope. Jas'o stomps and yanks Bella by the collar. She drops willingly to the ground again but springs to her full height in another instant, raking her claws from his groin up across his abdomen as she soars.
Her chain snaps halfway down its length, freeing them from each other; the metal defeated by the power of his body. But disarmed, taken by surprise, in such close quarters, he's nothing compared with the iron will of Empress Nero that's been twisted into the shape of this servitor. Redana's first companion. Her greatest. The only one she needs. Bella whirls, and her claws turn the rain red. She slashes his chest, his leg, his elbow, and his eye. She grabs him by the mouth and slams him against a wall, squeezing and listening intently for the sound of cracking jaw over the storm. She lets him go.
The mighty King slumps into the mud without help. Bella knees quietly beside him and traces her fingers across his many ragged wounds as a tiny smile spreads its way across her face.
"It's such a sad thing, O King. Is it not? Your prayers were made too late; mine were made before you laid eyes upon the Princess. Guess Zeus liked my offerings best of all~"
Bella's eyes dart across the alley to the Princess. Her Princess, covered in mud, writhing on the ground and choking for air. The smile falls off her face. Her claws squeeze at Jas'o's throat.
"Stupid shit-for-brains king. You weren't worthy to touch her. But that's a mistake you'll never have to make again."
She snatches at his throat with her claws, and her hand and the fur around her wrist turn red. She stands and kicks his limp head with her boot, staring down with unrestrained hatred. The Empress sanctioned acts like this for exactly one reason, and he'd gone and kicked that reason in the chest like the great clod he'd been. She spits.
And then the venom falls away from her. The world is still shrunken; there is only room for two. She turns and crosses the space between her and Redana, hiding her bloody hand behind her back. And she stands.
And she watches.
[Finish with Iron: 11]
