SASHA

The cut in Sasha's side was shallow, barely a scratch really, but it hurt like hell. She wasn't even sure what the pirate hit her with. Whatever it was had bored four perfectly round holes in the brickwork behind where the Wolf Knight had been standing, and it wasn't hard to imagine the same happening to her even now that she'd summoned her regalia. Zashara had summoned her own, tossing her trench coat aside, and not only could Sasha not figure out its weapons the overall effect was...disturbing.

Most Reglia took the form of some sort of armor, but it didn't have to. It could be a weapon, a glow around the body, a pair of wings, or it could alter the shape of the body itself—like Zashara's did. Before the pirate had been beautiful. More than that, desirable. A pubescent boy's fantasy of an older woman. The changes wrought by her active regalia hadn't exactly ruined that beauty, but they were so odd, so bizarre, that those were the kind of adjectives that sprang first to mind.

She stood twelve feet off the ground, a height her body had not grown to reach but stretched. Every line of her had grown impossibly long and slender, her legs and arms like stilts. Every joint of her fingers had lengthened, making her hands look like crazed spiders. Before she had possessed a well filled hourglass figure, now stretched thin and tall with a waist so small around it didn't even real, let alone like it could support her weight. Her neck was as long as her forearm had been, and even her skull had stretched higher and thinner.

“You dodged!” the pirate said appreciatively. “Not bad! Your Regalias are kind of boring though. I mean everyone's got fancy armor, you know?”

“My Rat Regalia is awesome!” Rimni shouted. “And what the hell are yousupposed to be, lady?”

“Aw you don't like it?” Sashara said with a mocking pout. “You know everyone's so proud of their ancient Regalias and how this hero or that villain used it that famous battle or whatever, but I formed the Stiletto Regalia myself through hard work and training. That's a little more impressive than getting some ancient idiot's hand me downs, don't you think so?”

“Careful Rimni!” Sasha shouted. “I still don't know what she tried to hit us with just now!”

“I know that!” Rimni said. “But it's okay, I know how to handle this fight!”

“Oh do you?” Zashura said with an amused smirk.

“Sure,” Rimni said. “I'm always fighting bad guys who are taller than me.”

He darted in to cut Zashara's ankles, but she tossed him aside with a flip of her leg. Her elongated limbs had a supple whip-like quality to them, like a wooden staff or the shaft of a spear. And like those weapons, small motions created a startling amount of force. Her kick sent Rimni flying and she turned her attention to Sasha. Her motions had a broken marionette quality to them that was oddly alluring at the same time it turned the stomach.

“Well?” Zashara urged, waving her fingers through the air. Each joint was the length of a normal finger, creating and unpleasant scuttling motion that made Sasha think of chitinous things in dark wet corners. “Aren't we going to fight?”

“Of course we are,” Sasha said, pulling her spear off her belt and extending it. “But I'm not stupid enough to fight you one on one.”

“So you've got backup somewhere around here I don't see?” the pirate laughed. “Or are you counting on the little kid to save you?”

“Don't sell him too short,” Sasha said. “But I've always got backup. We are pack.”

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

She split into five, each version of herself taking a different path towards the elongated pirate.

“What!?” Zashara blinked, completely taken aback. The hesitation was almost fatal, Sasha and her duplicates closing in on all sides with their spears. The pirate regained her composure and dropped down on her hip, one leg tucked underneath her to act as a fulcrum for the for a sweeping kick. Her whiplike leg ploughed through the duplicates, scooping them up between shin and ankle until momentum tossed them hard against a nearby wall, one of them exploding into glittering auram mist. Sasha and her still standing duplicate thrust their spears, slicing into the pirate woman's sides as she scuttled away.

“I'll admit,” Zashara glared at Sasha, “That's a good trick. Here's a better one.”

She thrust her hands out in front of her like a cartoon witch placing a curse. Her distended fingers shot forwards, lengthening by yards in less than a second and leaving perfectly circular holes in the walls and sidewalk wherever her fingertips hit. The pirate did something similar with her legs, using a sudden extension to launch herself into the air and come crashing down with a brutal ax kick that shattered the concrete for yours. But by the time she landed Sasha and all her duplicates had moved, two of them appearing behind her to ram their spears home, one into the side of Zashara's chest the other just above her hip.

“UNGH!” The pirate grunted. “That...hurts!” She spun her leg as she stood, tossing two more Sashas into the air and finishing them off with her fingertip-lances. They exploded into fluttering auram.

“How are you still standing?” Sasha demanded. Zashara had two holes clean through her now, both of them seeping blood.

“This?” Zashara laughed. “This is nothing. Minor flesh wounds.”

“I put two holes right through you!” Sasha snapped.

“Look at this body,” the pirate displayed her distended form like a model at the end of a runway. “Do you even know where my vital organs are? Or where my bones are? I've got to do a lot of rearranging to get this look!”

Zashara's arm shot out, extending like her fingers and legs had, and the pirate's fingers closed on Sasha's throat. Zashara lifted her struggling captive up into the air and with a flex of her wrist muscles the fingers holding Sasha's neck distended, spearing her through the throat in five different places...and making her disappear in a cloud of auram.

“Dammit!” Zashara hissed. “I thought that had to be the real one since it was the one that talked! But at least I know the one who's left is the real bitch.”

“Well in that case I've got good news and bad news,” Sasha said. “The good news is, now you know I'm the real one. The badnews is, I can do that trick more than once.”

Zashara howled in frustration as once again Sasha split off in five directions, surrounding the pirate in a ring of spears.

“This is so annoying!”Zashara snarled, firing her fingertip-javelins at the oncoming knights. She had to figure out who the real one was. Mentally she tagged them, #1 through #5, and tried to look for some clue to tell her which would bleed when she stabbed it.

“You were right,” #1 said.

“That is an impressive Regalia,” #2 chimed in.

“But as far as I can see,” #3 now.

“It's good for assassinations and duels,” #4 added.

“It's actually pretty terrible for multiple opponents,” continued #5.

“And we are pack!” All the Sasha's cried together, collapsing their formation on the flailing pirate. Zashara went on the offensive, dodging and weaving and changing her body's proportions again and again to avoid the storm of spear points coming her direction. She spun away from Sasha and her duplicates without taking another scratch, at least until a blur of motion passed her neck and cut an X into the flesh of her throat.

What? She tried to say out loud, touching her neck in shock. But she couldn't talk, the blood was pouring down her windpipe just as copiously as it was flowing down her chest. She gasped for words just the same, what word's she didn't know. She wasn't even sure what she felt. Anger? Sadness? Incredulity? She couldn't place the feeling and no words came, only the blackness, and by the time she hit the pavement her world had already gone dark.

Rimni came to a halt standing beside Sasha #3, his daggers still dripping blood.

“Besides,” Rimni said. “I'm here. And I'm a knight too!”

“I'll give you that much squirt,” Sasha smiled, letting her duplicates disappear. The pirate's body was already returning to it's normal shape on the ground, a faint mist of auram wafting off the body. “How did you know this was the real me?”

“Rat senses,” Rimni shrugged. “I can't believe that jerk Jurgo is trying to kill us after we beat him last time. Jerk Jurgo? That doesn't sound right, I should have come up with something better to call him...”

“No time,” Sahsa shook her head. “Can't you hear that?”

They paused to listen to air filled with sirens, explosions, and screams.

“Oh,” Rimni said. “I guess everybody's fighting already. We better go.”