The engorged, twitching claws tapped away at the brick she rested it on.
“I—Simple, it’s just simple, Cal… I’m running out of options~ I have to go down there, we have to just kill one of them out in the open. There’s no beating around the bush, I’m a horrible person anyways, and you need to get over this cannibalism thing! Can’t be one if you don’t look like them!”
The monster girl was leering on a roof top. Breathing heavily due to the misplaced weight, her entire side monster, and the other weak human. Massive limbs made from bone, but twisted and malformed. An arm that was five sizes too much for her, with a leg that was somehow less than a stand skeleton’s leg. Her brown hair growing so long it hit pass the calf. Her right-side pieces of her skull jutting out.
She had been crying the entire time, her normal eye flushed red while the other is pitch black with no pupil nor irid.
“No more thoughts,” Calypso huffed. “Thinking hurts because it’s dying. Now to cause a lot of death—”
“Hm.”
Calypso tightened, turning towards the darkest part of the roof.
Her eyes widened in disbelief at what she saw.
“It was really as simple as I thought it was… Calypso Grimes, new student of my class, and a wild beast being reported all over town… All reported around the same time…”
Mrs. Moses was hovering in the air as water currents wrapped around up her legs, crossing her mid-section in a helix as she glided forward, her arms extended and the source of the water.
“As an intellectual, I’m shaking my head at myself. But as a lover of YA genre fiction, you couldn’t have hit the major story beats any better...”
With a flick of the lady’s wrist, water streamed up her arm to form a blade that bubbled under it’s water surface. Aiming it at her mad student.
“Too bad that you’re not going to have the same end.”
Calypso smiled. But it was broken like the rest of her. Forgetting how to do it due to her exhausted brain, and physically unable to do it.
“B-but you can’t—you wouldn’t! You’re bluffing~”
Calypso was instantly stabbed in the chest, in her feeble human side. Cutting the air out of her body.
The woman didn’t even move. Her water blade just extended from where she hovered.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The fear set in. The reality immutable.
Calypso tried grabbing at the blade, and her fingers fell through it. “P-please! Be humane! I’m just a girl…!”
“That put a boy into critical condition, if my hunch is correct. I am being humane.”
Calypso’s face crumbled into a mess of tears. Collapsing before her murder, all she could plead.
“I c-came all this way…! And for what?! I survive, then turn into one of them! And I can’t even do that right…! I fought and fought, and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought! When I didn’t want to in the first place! Why?! Why?!”
She blubbered, wailing. A girl crying, with the reverberation of a monster’s roar.
“You’ve ‘fought’? Explain. And quick.”
Calypso whimpered, gasping and hiccupping.
“I-I-I and—A friend let die b-because I was weak… Her sp-spirit helped me, I fought the monster that got inside me—and then I became this!”
“…Interesting.”
“I can—still feel it inside! Trying to w-e-ear me like a skin…”
“You could feel it…? The monster that tried to take over? When it happened, completely aware of it’s movements?”
Calypso rose her head up, seeing Mrs. Moses’ raised eyebrows.
“Ye…yesh…”
“...” Mrs. Moses brow then furrowed. Letting silence build, outside of the sounds of rushing water.
Her blade collapsed, causing Calypso to fall onto the ground. Still twitching, still somehow alive.
“I was silently remarking upon your transformative healing…” Mrs. Moses put her fingers on her chin. “You’re on the verge of death and yet still able to trigger that… Unknowingly.”
She sighed visibly, using her entire body. She adjusted her falling glasses with her middle finger, at the center of the bridge.
Letting the shape of water move for her, Mrs. Moses moved to the pathetic girl. Lowering her onto her knees, and holding her still. Calypso was still whimpering, looking at this woman who was casually using water magic, completely at her mercy.
“Tell you what,” Mrs. Moses looked down upon her. “You look to have… One more transformation left in you? If not that? If you manage to survive it, then you have my kindness. If this kills you, then you have my mercy. Do you accept this?”
Calypso twitched, panted with reverent eyes. “H-help me… Please…”
“I need you to be clear with this. In fact, I’ll be more clear with you. I am helping you either way. One is a quick release that’ll end this senseless tragedy before you spread it to others. Another is explaining what a terrible fate that you will have to live with until it consumes you or the toll of it paid in full.”
She placed a hand on her own chest. “I’m an example of the latter. Despite the despair, despite the pain, and how limited my days are despite being 33… I’ve fought to have a decent life in the end. But you do have to keep fighting. And you might lose it all despite fighting back.”
Calypso looked down. Using the last of her dwindling brain power to search for an answer.
“And to make this less, er… Pardon the pun, but grim…” Mrs. Moses watched Calypso tilted her head. “Well, you seem to be a skeletal monster. Grim.”
Calypso took a while before understand, and then laughing softly. “S-sorry, I likes wordplay…”
Mrs. Moses smiled a bit. Ironically, this caused Calypso to shiver.
“It would be a shame… For you to not survive. You’re rather unique in various ways, and I would love to inform you of your potential.”
Calypso felt herself come down. Her arm sagging away from her body by the second, her struggling to mouth the words.
“I… Accept… Please…”
She jumped, as she realized that her teacher grabbed her head with both of her water coated hands. As they looked eye to eye.
Mrs. Moses’ eyes were voids, but with aquamarine lights radiating in them.
“Very well. Fight on, my dear new student.”
***