The Vermilion Queen was enraged, and I was loving it. The bitch didn’t know where to begin looking, and just threw fire everywhere to try and win my little game of hide and seek the “easy” way. But all she heard for hours was my haunting laughter and taunting through every flame she found.
She tried to get rid of them, but fire’s kinda hard to put out with more fire, especially if you’re just working through it instead of trying to exert power over it.
Finally, I got tired of the game, and appeared before her exactly as I was. Seven tails, a flowing robe in my own preferred style instead of the gaudy overdone excuse for fashion she favored, fluffy ears… and a mocking smirk on my lips.
“My my, how many priceless treasures have you destroyed in our little game? And even with all of that I had to come out of hiding on my own. You really are so horrible at finding people. Speaking of, where are your guards? Your soldiers? Your various ‘courtesans?’”
She blinked, and realized I had been the only person she’d directly spoken to…
“Don’t despair,” I said, using that same condescendingly sweet tone she had when we’d duped her into taking enough of us in to organize an evacuation. “Your pretty little pets are safe. Your soldiers though… not so much. It’s getting crowded in those hiding spaces we’ve been using to stay out of your way while you and your friends squabble over the playground, so my friends are taking it back. Right this second.”
She raged at that, and flew upward to attempt an escape through an upper window, only to find herself thrown to the floor as the fires rejected her.
“Hm… Xiang was right. You really don’t understand, do you?”
The flames ignited, blowing the leftovers of the palace away in a wave of fox fire. Instantly, the Vermilion Queen stood before an eight-tailed fox in human form, piercing eyes looking down on her even as I stretched out my qi to check on the evacuees.
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“Ah, good. They’re well out of range.” My smile sharpened. “I’m sure you remember what happened to your fat friend’s little stone pustule when my friend Xiang killed him. We fully expect the same will happen to your little home. But I’m done playing now. You’re no fun at all.”
The Vermilion Queen threw everything she had at me, a concentrated blast of fire qi that didn’t so much as singe my clothes or hair. Just to prove my point, I actually stopped it dead an inch from myself, then scattered her miniature sun into thousands of littler ones. A whole galaxy of tiny fox fires, each every bit as hot and deadly as the one she’d just tried to pierce my heart with.
“Beast! Abomination! I’ll kill you, and bring perfect life to this world!”
“My my, what language! Sorry dear, but you don’t have the capacity to understand the truths of perfection, or the reality of the true living flame. Sadly, all I can do is free the world of the one slowly killing it because she can’t see true beauty when she looks upon it.”
The midnight sky burst into light, as each tiny little foxfire star crashed into the Vermilion Queen and went nova inside her. A blast of light or heat the likes of which I would never want any mortal being to be anywhere near evaporated the bitch, and bathed me in so much qi that even I could barely handle the overload.
And that was nothing compared to the volcano that erupted under the ruins of the Vermilion Palace. The caldera was so vast that you couldn’t see one end of it from the other, and it didn’t so much burst forth as… well, ooze.
Still, it did a lot to disperse the fire qi that had been hoarded over the centuries, so the land would recover.
Cough.
Well, at least the soot and toxic gasses wouldn’t spread as far as a natural volcano’s would. I should probably get out of here.
I flew to the refugee caravan, and landed safely in the foremost cart. Everyone stared at me in utter shock, while Song glared at me again.
“What? We all knew the bitch was going down.”
My daughter merely sighed.
“Mother, the way you destroyed the Vermilion queen was ridiculously flashy, and speaking of flashing, did you even notice your favorite robes were vaporized when you stood right next to an atomic detonation?”
I wanted to ask where she’d learned the words atomic detonation, but realized she was right.
“Well, nothing any of us haven’t seen before, and I need to feed your sisters anyway.”
And so we went, returning to the northlands.