“Umm, umm, he- he- hell- hello.” Was this Rezin’s sister or something? The girl in front of Kada was just as nervous as he’d been when he first arrived—worse even. She was shaking so much that even the tufts of hair on top of her head that looked like animal ears were flailing around—a literal scaredy cat.
“Hello,” was all Kada said in return for the time being. She’d tried to take a step towards the girl, but that alone had caused her to flinch, so she kept her distance for now. Was this shivering kitten even a Fiend? From her appearance, she obviously was—mauve colored hair, chartreuse colored eyes, and a Curse Mark of a set of purple monster fangs front-and-center on her neck.
The better question probably was why she was with the army to begin with. She didn’t seem like a soldier, or someone who could even throw a punch, or someone who could handle even the slightest form of confrontation for that matter.
“Y- Y- You’re The Mermaid, r-right?” the girl continued to stutter so Kada gave a gentle nod in response. “I’m, I’m, Laurim. Laurim Marasa. They, they call me The Zoo. Call me The Zonked Zoo because they think I’m lazy, b- bu- but-”
It seemed she couldn’t really get her latest thought out as proper words, so Kada tried to help move things along. “So you’re here to fight me then?” She was a bit curious what the girl’s reaction to impromptu aggression would be, even if it wasn’t really aggressive.
“Fight?!” Laurim froze on the spot. “Right… we’re supposed to fight.”
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Kada insisted. “I can’t let you leave until the raid is over, but we can just sit here if you want.”
“N-no!” the girl suddenly spat and then seemed to be taken aback by her own ferocity. “I have to fight. If I don’t then they’ll… So let’s fight!” She showed a semblance of confidence but then didn’t really do anything afterwards and just started mumbling to herself.
“What should I do? I should be strong, right? Guerrilla’s are strong, right? Or maybe I should be fast like a cheetah. Or I could fly and attack, maybe a falcon and scratch her?”
The mumbling went on like that for a while, so Kada decided to push her a little farther. She’d started melting the floor ever so slowly, subtly turning the room into a pond inch by inch. It had gotten up almost to their knees by the time the girl who was lost in her own thoughts finally noticed.
“Gah, water! But I can’t swim!” Laurim started pacing back and forth, thrashing through the liquid. “Calm down, calm down. I just need something that can swim. What can swim? Sharks! Sharks can swim. Okay, picture a shark.” She placed the tips of her fingers against both sides of her had and began to chant in remembrance, “Shark, shark, sharky, shark.”
What’s wrong with me, what is this feeling? Some weird emotion had been tiptoeing around in Kada’s heart from the moment she laid eyes on Laurim. She looks so innocent and helpless. I just… I can’t explain it, but I really just want to tease and bully her. Wait! Is this what it's like to be Phon all the time?!
“Okay, got the shark,” Laurim was still concentrating hard. “But what to pair it with. Since I’m not used to water creatures, something with strong long legs. I know, a bull! What to call it, though? A shark bull… a shull… a bark? Yeah, that’s good. Transform: Bark!”
This was something Kada had been looking forward to ever since finding out Laurim would be her opponent. From the medical records they’d stolen from the Central Peace, Laurim Marasa had been the only Fiend they could identify. All the military records had been encrypted and ciphered—too much of a bother to brute force open for how they were going to use the data.
The only reason to do so now would be to try and get a full roster of all Fiends currently in their military, but the information they had was outdated from their infiltration, so it wouldn’t even be accurate. There was still the backdoor they’d left behind in the CP computer system, but they’d probably only get one chance to use it before it was discovered and squashed, so it was being saved for an absolute emergency.
The only reason Laurim’s information had been readily available, was because she was listed as a member of the science division at the time. Since then, Phon had inquired with Phontext about her and shared the information about her abilities. So Kada, and everyone else in the Fiends For Hire, had a pretty good idea of what her Curse could do: turning into monsters.
Specifically, the Curse had to make a monster composed of two animals, though there’d been a fluke now and then where she'd managed to incorporate the components of three small ones. Under no circumstances, though, had she ever been able to just turn into a single animal. This was likely due to her Curse’s origins since it had been caused by one of the Drazah’s mutated monsters.
Apparently, the Curse came with a rather infamous transformation sequence. They hadn’t been able to find any information on it or any leaked video footage, so it had always been a mystery—one Kada was eager to solve and witness, so she waited with baited breath.
It blew away her expectations, while befuddling, intriguing, charming, and disgusting her all at the same time. Laurim’s body curled up into a ball and started looking like it was compressing in on itself. Kada didn’t get a long time to look at it before it was covered in the shell that wrapped around her body, but she did think she saw Laurim’s body start to melt for a second.
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What was left in the girl’s place was an egg, but not just any egg, a large egg that looked like it had been painted by a child. It had a rough artistic interpretation of Laurim drawn on the shell, almost like a stuffed toy version of her in design. At first, the egg’s tip just barely poked out of the liquid, but it started to grow and grow and grow.
Finally, once it reached its needed size, the egg jumped up into the air and cracked. A giant creature fell into the water with a splash and the leftover shell dematerialized into nothingness.
Laurim’s new form was both expected from what Kada heard and still somewhat surprising. She was certainly a bull shark—bark—with the body of a shark and the legs,head, and horns of a bull. But of course, she had the jaw and teeth of a shark. If she was out in the wild, any hunter would almost certainly mistake her for a typical monster.
The only thing that stood out was the coloration. She wasn’t fully purple, but that was definitely the primary color. Anywhere there should be hair, it was the same mauve colored hair she normally had. Additionally, her shark skin was primarily mauve as well, but it shifted in a gradient as it wrapped around her body into her gray underbelly.
Okay, that’s actually kind of terrifying, Kada couldn’t help but be intimidated by the overbearing monster—a nightmare straight from the bottom of the ocean’s abyss—standing before her. She’d never seen it in any bestiaries, and never heard Drim talk about one at any point, so it must have been a brand new creation born from Laurim’s imagination.
To add to the horror, the beast charged her at once. Kada had expected it though given something else in Phon’s breakdown. Laurim was still in full control, both body and mind, but her instincts were altered to be those closer to an average of the two animals she turned into. Right now, she saw Kada as a threat, and both sharks and bulls weren’t exactly timid when it came to dealing with threats.
Since the monster had to trudge through water, it probably wasn’t going as fast as it could, but it was still a speed Kada couldn’t ignore. She managed to get out of the way with time to spare, but it was still cutting it closer than she would have liked.
Well, she mentioned not being able to swim. Let’s see how well that translates. Kada increased her melting speed and quickly liquified the ground below them to a depth of a few dozen feet. Now they were both wading in a proper pool. Laurim’s shark body was plenty buoyant and kept her floating on the surface as well.
Kada dove under the water, swimming down all the way to the bottom to see if Laurim would follow her. Since Kada could breathe in the liquid, she could just hide out under the surface the entire time if even the monster version of Laurim couldn’t swim. But no such luck.
The Bark submerged itself a second later and began charging after her again. What's more, the combined movement of the shark with the strong legs of the bull made her able to swim even faster than either would be able to on their own. It looked like a rampaging horse that now wasn’t limited to just the land.
Kada questioned how Laurim was able to target her so easily. She had her goggles to see underwater, but the Bark’s vision should be impeded by the liquid rock. Was her sense of smell so strong that it could detect a human through all that thick liquid? Did Kada really smell that bad?
She still dodged again, but it was even harder that time, and she got scraped by one of the monster’s horns. The trail of blood she was now exuding would make hunting her down in the water even easier, so Kada decided to quickly abandon the submersed tactic.
Once Kada breached the surface, she began solidifying the water from the bottom up. Not to be so cruel as to bury Laurim alive, Kada wanted to give her a chance to escape. But she might not get another chance to trap her like this again, so she was aiming to try and finish the resealing as soon as the Bark’s head poked out so that it could still breathe while trapping the rest of the body.
The monster was smarter than it looked, though. As soon as it realized what was happening, it swam to the surface at full speed and leapt out of the water. Kada finished turning the liquid back into rock as soon as she was up in the air, so the monster landed with a rough thud.
Now with no water on the field, and unable to use her shark body to her advantage, Kada would see how well the Bark could attack. Turns out, quite well. Now it was just a pissed off bull running around unrestrained, and Kada had to slip back under the surface to manage her next dodge.
That led Kada right back to the beginning; a room with about a foot of water to hamper the monster’s running speed. Sometimes the first idea was the best and should be stuck with.
What followed was a game of cat and mouse—Bark and Mermaid. Laurim kept succumbing to her instincts and chasing Kada around the room, but escape was easy for Kada who repeatedly slipped in and out of the floor and walls. She was wearing the beast down, hoping that it would remain this simple until the Bark had tuckered itself out.
Just when Kada thought Laurim was about to drop from exhaustion, she suddenly gained a second-wind, putting all of her energy into one last attack. Kada was back against a wall, so she slipped through it at the last second, not giving Laurim time to change course. She rammed straight into the wall, getting her horns stuck.
The pitiful Bark tried to reel its head backwards and free itself to no avail. It then made the weirdest noise, which Kada had to guess was Laurim crying out in frustration. She was about to free it by melting the wall, but she didn’t get the chance.
The eggshell from before surrounded the Bark, shrunk in size, and then spat Laurim out a moment later in the exact same position. For whatever reason, the transformation process back was much quicker. Laurim’s head slid down the wall as she collapsed into the still foot high water. She then flipped up backwards, gasping for air, and then fell onto her back. This caused her to shoot up again, once more on a plight for oxygen, but she sat up properly this time.
“Ehhhhhh, so tired. I don’t want to fight any more,” the poor girl looked on the verge of a mental breakdown. “But I don’t wanna move… Need something with a lot of reach, and something with good defense so I don’t have to worry about dodging. Hmm… Got it!” Laurim suddenly slapped one of her fists into the flat open palm of the other. “Transform: Octohog!”