The gigantic mantis stalked across the frozen ground with the grace and power of a ship cutting through the waves. With each step, ice splashed up into bristled spikes. With each step, it grew faster. It raced toward them, and the spear carriers ran for cover. The young woman pulled at the children, and they ran crying back toward the motel.
Zoe stood still, with Jack and Anton a half step behind her.
She waited for the mantis, each step it took in time with her heart pounding blood through her veins. A static buzz of oblivion coated her skin.
Was this the rage she stole from the boss of the Mirror Bell dungeon come to haunt her? Nothing in her life ever felt so white hot and all-consuming. This didn’t feel human, but it felt right.
The mantis stopped running with inhuman precision. It towered above them and radiated cold. An aura that drew Zoe’s body heat and attention. Called on her to walk up toward its clawed arms and surrender herself.
She couldn’t tell this creature’s power. With its wings tucked away, its level remained hidden. Though it shielded the size of its Skein, she could detect the depth, and it was fathomless.
Her rage guttered as her bravado cooled.
The mantis peered down at them. Its mandibles peeled back to reveal a human mouth set within lipless pink gums. It licked its teeth, clicking deep in its throat, before it spoke:
“Your payment is sufficient. Follow me.”
It turned and strode away, but Zoe didn’t follow. The mantis stopped, and its head rotated completely to view them.
“Follow. You belong to the queen now.”
“We are not payment. We belong to ourselves.”
The mantis’s eyes remained fixed on Zoe as it rotated its body to match the orientation and face her.
“Incorrect.”
It raised a scything claw. White light glowed from the translucent blue armor, as though its veins burned with incandescent steel. Power whipped out toward Zoe.
She leaped back, her arms picking up Anton and Jack as she moved backward, and then again, as the burning lines followed. She landed in the motel parking lot.
The mantis followed her with its gaze as its technique faded out.
Ice formed in the wake of the burning cords. Thick cables frozen in a wiggling pattern. They crisscrossed where Zoe had stood. A prison of tangled ice that would have snared her in place.
It raised both claws in a v of barbed chitin. Ribbons of light danced out through the air toward them.
The trio separated. Jack released a cloud of burning petals, but the ice-cold ribbons swept through them with a hiss. Anton’s eyes floated out, and he spoke to each of them.
“Left! Duck! To your right!”
They moved aside as the ribbons flickered and left frozen ropes in their wake, and Zoe closed the distance. Her chain smashed through a frozen net and she leaped, bringing her club down against the mantis’s thorax. It sidestepped her, but her chain lashed out and grabbed a leg. She hauled herself in, momentum maintained, and crashed a mighty blow against the icy chitin.
A reverberation rang deep in her bones from the shock of the blow.
The ambassador swayed with the impact. It recovered and swung at Zoe with a barbed claw, but she was already clear.
The mantis clicked its tongue against its teeth.
“Troublesome.”
Ribbons of light wrapped around it, cocooning it, until its whole body burned with light as it floated off the ground, and shrunk. Waves of windswept snow buffeted Zoe, and even with her mirrored skin deflecting the fragments, she shielded her eyes against the glare. Light pulsed. She blinked.
The light faded, and Zoe gasped.
Where the ambassador had stood, there was now a young woman. She looked like a teenager, her head barely at Zoe’s shoulders. Long pale blue hair ran down across her face, and with delicate hands, she parted it to reveal regal features, chiseled and cruel. Her skin glowed like translucent porcelain. Blue veins showed beneath like frozen rivers. Her enormous eyes locked on Zoe as she smiled with perfect pearlescent teeth. A short dress of snow white fluttered in the breeze as she stood up on her tiptoes and stretched out her body.
“This form is much easier to fight you humans.”
At her hip was a short sickle carved from a rib. Her club resonated dully at the sight.
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Zoe felt an overwhelming pressure and dread. This was no simple mantis she could crush like a bug. Maybe… she bit off more than she could chew with this one.
But she readied her club and wrapped her chain around her arm. She stoked the fires in her heart. Anger would help her move, but she needed to stay calm. She needed to think and —
The ambassador appeared before her.
Zoe’s eyes widened. She swung, but the ambassador moved inside her guard and raised an elbow. The blow snapped Zoe’s chin back and sent her flying.
It had been so fast! The world spun between the white ground and the pink sky. The ambassador appeared above her, a heel raised to the heavens before it snapped down like a battleaxe.
Zoe stared. She was too slow to respond.
And then the reflected force from the ambassador’s first strike lashed out. The reflected force caught the descending heel and spun them away from each other. Zoe struck the ground hard, bounced, and landed on all fours. Her club clattered to the ground, but she snatched it up with her chain as she stood.
Pain throbbed through her jaw. She had been hit harder before, but it was the blistering speed that worried her. What did it matter how hard her opponent hit if Zoe couldn’t dodge? Eventually [Self Reflects the World] would run out of Skein. Speaking of…
[Skein 201/298]
She regretted tanking the blow from the burning asshole. She could almost hear Oriz chiding her about wasting Skein.
The ambassador landed on her feet some distance away. Her head cocked inhumanly as she studied Zoe.
“Interesting,” she said.
A storm of burning petals drifted between them. The ambassador stepped back from Jack’s technique. A single petal drifted toward her, and she stuck out a finger. Flame met icy skin and sizzled out.
The ambassador grinned, crouched, and charged through the cloud of petals. They burst on her skin into flowers of black and red, but she didn’t slow. Wings of glowing energy slid out from behind her in a growing pattern. With every unsheathed wing, Zoe’s dread grew. Twenty-One wings.
The ambassador was level 42.
Zoe was only 31. Anton was only 17, and Jack was 14.
The creature was built for speed, and it had a technique that countered escape. It would pin them down and then barrage them with unavoidable attacks.
The ambassador drew its sickle from its waistband and raised it high. White light flashed from the bone as it channeled a technique, and then the ambassador dashed forward.
Zoe leaped without thinking. She needed to dodge, and just in time. The ambassador turned its head to smile at Zoe as she moved through the air. It dug its delicate heels into the ground, gouging up snow and sending a fine spray, before it adjusted its angle and sped toward her, trailing blinding light.
It caught up to her, swung, and Zoe parried with her club. Bone struck bone and light flashed out and froze. The ice clung to Zoe’s weapon dragging it down, as the ambassador leaped away and sped toward Jack and Anton.
Anton aimed and fired his pistol. The ambassador sidestepped each shot with a pleasant laugh. Everywhere it moved, it trailed the white ribbon, and ice formed in a slender rope, boxing them in. Jack’s technique filled the air, so bright they washed out the pink sky and filled the area with burning red light.
But each petal winked out upon the ambassador’s skin.
Zoe charged. Her feet pounded the ground. Cracks formed in silence beneath her midnight boots. She had no grace compared to the ambassador, but she had the might of a runaway train. Her chain wrapped around the club handle as she swung.
It twirled to face her as it flipped away into the air.
Zoe snarled and kept swinging through the space. She released her club, and it flew after the ambassador on the end of her chain. The ambassador's eyes widened, but it parried and leaped away.
Zoe reeled in her club, shivering with fear as her heart hammered through her body. This wasn’t working.
Slowly they spread out around the waiting ambassador. Anton stashed his pistol in favor of his axe. Jack likewise kept an axe out as fire burned in his other hand. Zoe lazily looped her chain.
They had to be careful how they moved, with the frozen ribbons making the space awkward, but if Zoe could entangle the ambassador in her chains, she could pin it down. Then, she could use her strength.
And if that plan wasn’t enough — if her strength wasn’t enough — well, it would have to be.
Because with an enemy that fast, running wasn’t an option.
Zoe braced herself as the ambassador sailed through the air toward her. The heartbeats of her friends pounded in her ears. She readied her club like a baseball bat and swung.
She missed.
The ambassador ducked beneath and behind Zoe, wrapping her up in the glowing ribbon of Skein. Zoe cast out her chain before the cage could complete around her and hauled herself out. The chain retracted but the ambassador dug in her heels. Zoe shot forward. Might surged through her arm as her mirrored fist struck the ambassador’s chest and knocked them down to the ground.
The reflected punch followed. Frozen dirt exploded out as Zoe drove the ambassador down to the ground. Her chain snaked around her arms and strained, but Zoe had her pinned, though she wouldn’t hold it for long. She raised her club high and slammed it down into the ambassador’s face. The impact rolled like thunder. Reverberations ached through her bone. She channeled the thrum of pain and struck again. Harder, louder, and again, as she rang her club against the high-level flesh.
Bruises formed on the pale features of the struggling mantis, but no blood.
“Enough,” the ambassador said as she stopped struggling.
Her whole body flashed like a strobe. She grew as she reverted to her insectile form. The Black Star chain struggled. It lengthened and strained. Echoes of pain shot through Zoe. She pulled on the chain, straining her connection to both systems and fell to her knees as the ambassador reared above her.
Her chains burst apart.
White hot pain shot through Zoe. She collapsed as the burning links of her chain hissed in the snow.
The ambassador towered overhead. Its barbed claws were longer than she was tall and they flashed like ice in the noonday sun. They fell, trailing ribbons of light, and Zoe dodged.
She was too slow.
The ambassador’s claws snatched her up, but they didn’t slice her. Ribbons of light wrapped her and tightened, crackling as they formed wrappings of solid ice. She struggled, but couldn’t move. As more ribbons froze they expanded and crushed her until her breath came in thin gasps.
The ambassador studied her, its insectile head monstrously large as its mandibles clacked and revealed the gumless teeth behind.
It placed her gently on the ground before stepping away, bowing, and dashing toward her allies.