It happened in an instant, and that's all the time she gets to raise her arm up to her head. It slams into her and she flies, crashing into the wall and falling to the floor. Her eye’s wide at the giant. Her left arm is broken in so many places it’d be more accurate to call it shattered, her head hurts and everything is ringing. Her friends are scrambling towards her.
The giant lifts his hammer again, and all she has is an instant to act.
Everything slows, almost like the world is frozen, and she sees every inch as the hammer gets closer to Sasha’s head. It is a thing that will bring death, and she only has an instant.
All of her being, everything that is her screams as she sends an astral hand that closes the distance and pushes Sasha away. She’s winded, but alive.
The giants hammer breaks through the floor as Sasha tries to regain her breath. The giant looks confused as he looks towards the girl, then back at his hammer. He looks at Alex.
“What did you do?” he demands, Alex responds by drawing her katana as she stands to face the man, a hard look in her eyes.
“Akihiro,” she says to the boy beside her “I need you to grab Sasha and run”
Aki looks at her like she’s grown wings and started to fly “no” he says “your not doing this alone, i’m not-”
“Aki,” she hisses, “this isn’t the time.”
He hesitates, nods, then goes to grab Sasha, the giant waits patiently to leave as he faces her with a strange look in his eye.
“I’m willing to show mercy, if you show me what it was you just did.” The giant says.
Alex spits blood on the floor “Fuck you” even if she wanted to, the migrane she has right now is fucking horrendous. The giant nods.
“Hard way it is then.”
Alex jumps and the hammer zips from under her, she goes to cut but doesn’t find an opening as she navigates a maze of death-
He hits her again, and for the second time in as many minutes she is sent flying, crashing through the window and into a car. The giant walks out of the house and towards her slowly, taking his time as she coughs up blood.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he says as he picks her up by her hair, she spits blood at him and he sighs before smashing her head into the cars roof. “It never needs to be this way, but every now and then I meet someone who thinks they can’t break.” He slams her again. “They are always proven wrong, all you accom-”
He is cut off by many bullets that slam into his back, causing him to stumble forward a bit, he looks back to find Aki with his ramus pointed at him.
“Children are so foolish” he grumbles, “Teal, deal with him.”
The purple haired woman smiles and dashes back into the building. Alex panics, she feels for her soul and finds it on the verge of breaking. She doesn’t care, an astral hand flies from her outstretched one, and grabs Aki by the collar before flinging him through the broken window. Her vision goes dark…
NO
She opens her eyes and finds herself in two places at once, in one she is still being held by the giant while he marvels at the act she just did.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
In the other she is standing in front of what she thinks is her soul. It is not a ball or mist or liquid, it is all those things and just a pinprick all at once. It is breaking, she cannot see so much as feels the cracks as they spread at an alarming pace.
She stretches her arm.
She grabs her soul.
PAIN, not the feeling, but the concept, tears through everything she is.
She does not let go, she holds it together as the her in the other place does something different.
She forms two hands, stronger than even her own, and plucks out the giant's eyes. The giant bellows alongside her scream as her soul contracts and expands rapidly, multiple new cracks form but she does not let go. She is bleeding from the eyes and ears and a little bit through her pores. She cuts her hair and falls out of the giant's grip.
Then she sees Sasha as she points her raptor towards the purple haired woman and she WILLS the girl to know where to shoot, as she can only do it once. The bullet goes through the woman's eye and her brain.
She does not let go.
Her stomach contracts hard as a tidal wave of blood comes out of her mouth like a torrent, the giant is swinging in random directions as he tries to find her, and Aki pulls her up onto her feet as Sasha runs towards them.
Just like that, the her that's in reality passes out at the sight of her friend's safety. The her that is in her soul cannot rest yet, her soul has chasms in it now that is barely held together by her hand alone, if she lets go, something worse than death will take her.
-
The sewers aren’t really fit for travel, here the downtrodden and destitute roam away from the cities light, refusing to be trapped into one of the Megastructures. It’s one of the only things the cops stay on top of, hunting the streets for more cheap labour to be added to the corpo’s payroll. Those that refuse that fate take refuge here, and are regularly hunted. Now he has to travers next to shit filled waters because he was too fucking trusting of a bunch of corpo’s. Alex is cold, so cold, but she isn’t dead, her heart still beats and her lungs still breath. He fucked up and again his friends paid the price, he can’t keep doing this, he needs to be better.
As they carry Alex through the sewers he resolves himself.
Fuck this mission he thinks we’re going back home.
Now just to figure out how to do that.
-
The brain is so chunky, so dense and difficult to heal, even with nanites. It takes a while for Teal to start feeling like herself, it takes longer for her to be able to move. So many inconveniences.
She can’t help but smile.
-
Alex can’t let go.
She tries to force her soul back together but that only makes it worse, the only thing she can seemingly do is just hold it there and hope it heals on its own. It’s not, or if it is it’s so minute as to be insignificant. The pieces are so far apart.
She holds everything that is her and hopes that she can recover from this.
-
“We need food and water,” Aki argues,”I’m not gonna let us die of something as stupid as dehydration after surviving Goliath”
“They know our faces,” Sasha hisses, “we need to find one of the communities here and ask for shelter.”
Aki shakes his head, “they’re more likely to kill us to keep their location a secret, no , i’m going out and I will be back. I swear.”
Sasha deflates, why is everyone being an idiot today? And why is she so fucking useless in comparison? Alex might never wake up again, all because she had to save her two fuckoff nobody friends. Now Aki’s going to go on his own in enemy territory to keep them alive, and what did she contribute? Absolutely fuckall. She knows that shot wasn’t her own talent shining through, she could feel herself being guided, like a simple certainty of where and when to shoot that was seared into her mind. She knows that was not her.
She looks at Alex’s pale form and laments how useless she is.
-
He brings his sword down on the ganger, cutting him fully in half from shoulder to pelvis. It’s…liberating to not have to babysit, it was most of the reason he let them stay in that house. He was worried when he got a message saying they switched locations but they should be fine.
He’s spent the last days and nights cutting through Kingdom fools like they were butter. He doesn’t particularly like killing but he doesn’t hate it either. It’s just a job like any other, and these dumbfucks almost killed the Dragon heir. He’s not the smartest, but even he knows that’s just asking for war. He’s not looking forward to what comes after. But that’s a later problem, for now he has more people to kill.
He gets a ping on his interface.
A message from Sasha.
Does she fucking think he’s free to text any time?
…
Excuse me what the fuck?