Desmond had a knife in his kneecap before he could even shimmy his hips.
Slythorn rolled her eyes as the boy collapsed, the bell dinged, and Devola certified the match over. The whole ordeal gave Momo very little time to regain her strength. She was already being ushered towards the stage before it had been wiped clean of Desmond’s blood.
“Show ‘er what you’re made of, your highness,” Grimli said, tugging on the back of Momo’s cloak as she limped onto the stage. “And watch out for that bracelet of hers. Dwarven engineering, it is.”
“Wait – it’s what?” Momo snapped her head to look at him. But Grimli was already being taken away by stage security, shoved into the crowd with the rest of the groupies.
Slythorn opted out of the staircase entirely, jumping onto the stage with a single, elegant hop. It was clear her Dexterity was higher than average. Why would a Knight of the Sun have such an emphasis on Dexterity, though? Not to mention her affinity for knives. It wasn’t adding up. If Momo were to take her skills at face value, she’d assume her to be some kind of rogue.
Not to mention their supposed connection. Momo had turned the exhausted cogs of her mind around it for days since, and the only plausible culprit she could think of was one of the thieves she met back in Nam’Dal, somehow masquerading as a Knight of the Sun to achieve her own ends. It wouldn’t be a hard camouflage to pull off nowadays, Momo imagined, given that most of the Knights were on an entirely different continent.
But what did a thief gain from pushing Kyros’s agenda? That was where her train of thought hit a sharp, ragged corner. Certainly neither Mordecai nor Morgana would be fond of a stunt like that. Either way, it seemed like an awkward route to success – it’d make much more sense for an opportunistic rogue to try to rise to power under Momo’s regime instead of at odds with it.
I must be missing something. Momo frowned.
A few feet from her, Slythorn adjusted her white mask. Without the distraction of the silly headgear, the face covering was truly an eerie thing – with a mouth made out of handcrafted clay, splayed out and faintly grinning; Momo could see why Grimli had been shivering in his socks about it.
The whole of her was hidden like a scar under heavy foundation. The woman’s hands were gloved, revealing barely a hint of skin. The only thing Momo could deduce about her was that she was thin, muscular, and just slightly taller than herself. Even her hair was covered under a silk scarf, her ankles dressed in sheer leggings and topped with white robes. It was a dense costume, obviously intended to conceal as much as possible. No matter who hid underneath it, the wearer clearly had a secret to protect.
“Aren’t you going to say something vaguely menacing like we meet again?” Momo teased, steadying her voice to conceal just how weak she was feeling. “I feel like it’d match the whole persona you’ve got going on.”
“Would that amuse you, Momo?” Slythorn replied, her hand caressing the tip of her knife.
“Maybe a little bit,” Momo said. “But I’m not really in the mood to be amused. I’m really in the mood to figure out why a thief is all dressed up in that ridiculous costume posing as some big Kyros-head. You must have a good reason. I imagine it’s humid as hell under all that fabric.”
Slythorn’s hand stilled on her knife.
Got you. Momo grinned.
“That’s what I thought,” Momo said, grinning slightly.
“Aren’t you clever,” Slythorn hummed. “But not clever enough to consider my offer?”
“Seriously? The one where I hand over the keys to the Queendom to you without knowing a single thing about your organization or your intentions? Sue me for having more than one brain cell,” Momo mumbled, rolling her eyes. “You’re going to have to throw in a few freebies at the very least if you’re going to get me on board.”
Slythorn laughed darkly under her mask. Momo would have said it reminded her of a Bond villain, only she’d never seen a James Bond movie. Such films were strictly banned for the children of the Lim household, deemed too fun by her parents, who, when they went about learning English, decided they didn’t need extraneous words like scary or adult or pg-13. Fun did the job perfectly well, even if it did confuse any and all classmates who came over to Momo’s house and found a stack of DVDs labeled too fun in the corner.
Still, despite her imprisonment in the not fun corner of the movie shelf, she had heard that expression a lot growing up: like a Bond Villain. Even her parents liked to use it. They heard their new American friends throw it around. So Momo’s vivid imagination filled in the blanks: someone sexy, sly, mischievous, evil. She didn’t know that Slythorn was sexy, probably not, but she fit the bill otherwise; what with her dark laughter, diabolic aura, et cetera.
“I can think of a few freebies. That boy, what was his name – Trent?” Slythorn said after a considering moment, slotting her dagger into her holster and bringing Momo back to the reality of the situation. “If you come to our side now, we’ll spare him. If you take your time, I can’t make any promises. The Holy Resistance charges interest on stupidity.”
Nevermind, Momo thought, reassessing her opponent. Threatening children – that was decidedly not Bondesque. No, she sounded like a cartoon villain. One dimensional and ineffective. The ridiculous dark affect on her voice; the low, mirthy octaves; the recited textbook-bad-guy lines. It was all an elaborate maze of misdirections.
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She’s just playing a role, Momo thought, her eyes narrowing. She’s running a scheme on me and everybody else here.
“I would never want to work with someone that would threaten to kill a child over something as stupid as a kingdom,” Momo said, glaring. “Plus, I don’t believe you. I think your whole getup is a sham. You’re not going to actually kill anyone.”
“Oh, Momo,” Slythorn sighed. “You always have been so beautifully naive.”
For just a moment, the woman’s voice dipped into her natural tone. It was creamy and smooth, and it pinged Momo’s memory like a beacon in a dark sea. She saw a flash of a woman sitting on a bedside, jovially retelling stories, her raven hair falling over her stunning face.
“Wait,” Momo said, her hands falling slack to her sides. “Nia?”
As recognition hit her like a truck, the match bell rang out.
Momo had no time to think. A dagger came flying at her faster than she could say the other woman’s name aloud. She shoved the realization aside, casting [Focus] as she flung out of the way of the gleaming tip of the knife. Even at her evolved level of Dexterity, the blade still managed to chip her on the cheek, leaving a sharp, scathing line of blood running below her eye. She saw red when she blinked.
Momo’s next few thoughts came in rapid staccato. [Focus] tended to have that effect. Every moment blended in with the next, colors went from vibrant neons to grayscale. Weak, feeble thoughts like I don’t know if I’m fast enough were jumbled in the great blender of her subconscious, turning into such behemoth instructions like getoutofthewaymoverightmoveleftjumpup like she was operating Mario on a joystick. Only she was Mario.
Nia threw dagger after dagger, her brow creasing with exhaustion each time Momo flung herself out of the way with graceless agility. The crowd was eating up, slobbering over Momo’s performance like she had choreographed it herself, slaved over it like a trainee at an idol workshop.
“Stay still, you rabbit,” Nia spat, throwing out a shuriken. She had emptied herself of daggers. "You're wasting my perfectly good equipment."
Momo dodged the shuriken with a skip and a hop, the star piercing into wood and joining its many metal brethren. By now, seven blade hilts stuck out of the wood like overly long nails. Momo felt quite like a dartboard at a dingy sports bar. Nia was down on the count, only a few beer-stained darts left, and running out of options.
Still, Momo couldn’t relax. Even when she wasn’t Mana-drained, Nia was a formidable opponent beyond what she usually went up against – disturbingly fast, agile, and intelligent. The only way she’d evaded her before was with Valerica’s help.
“That doesn’t look much like dancing,” Devola suggested into the microphone, jolting both Momo and Nia from their back-and-forth. “You both better show me some real performance or I’ll serve you with a mutual disqualification.”
Crap.
Reaching into the darkest depths of her [Focused] mind, Momo remembered the dance class Dae-hyun took in high school – back when he was certain he’d go professional as a hip-hop artist. She had forced down the memory for obvious reasons, too much second-hand embarrassment, but it bubbled to the top of her consciousness at that very critical moment.
“Momo, your footwork is so bad,” Dae had whined, pushing at her shoulders and running back the track – One Dance by Drake it had been. That song had an unholy grip on 2016.
“I don’t even know why I’m doing this with you.”
“Because you want your favorite brother to succeed,” he had said. “Now, one, two, three…”
Muscle memory ran through her veins, and she began to instinctually shuffle her feet side to side, shrugging her shoulders back as she did so. She could practically feel Dae’s comments and critiques in the back of her head, his disembodied voice haunting from beyond the pale. Needs more swag, he’d say, and she’d groan. Still, somehow, the rhythm guided her.
Then – woosh. Another shuriken soared straight for her neck, but Momo felt it coming. She swayed out of the way with ease. The simple back-and-forth movement helped her calm down and tap into the Nether surrounding her. She could see Nia’s soul chain rippling back and forth like a sea serpent as she darted around the stage.
“Just give in already,” Nia seethed, punctuating each word with a step taken towards her. To Momo’s surprise, she bounded off the wooden platform, twirling and landing in front of her. Before Momo could react, she had her final dagger pressed to Momo’s throat. Cold steel on hot flesh.
“Die,” Nia said.
Momo yelped, catching the other woman’s wrist with an urgency. She poured every last bit of her strength into keeping the blade from piercing the soft tissue under her chin. Still, Nia's strength was greater; a choking sensation began to build in her throat, the pressure mounting.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Momo choked out. “We’re on the same team.”
Nia scowled, pressing harder. Momo met her with equal and opposite force; the two of them were a trembling mess of muscle, two rocks pressed up against each other in an imminent avalanche.
“We’ve never been on the same team,” Nia said coldly. While her expression was hidden behind her mask, Momo could see the betraying desperateness in her eyes. “You became my enemy the moment you chose to follow Valerica.”
“But Valerica saved you –”
“She didn’t save me. Sera saved me,” she growled. “And if you hadn’t gotten in the way of our plan, I wouldn’t have needed saving. After the missiles hit, I spent months in the Nether, my soul in stasis, stuck in a sanity-destroying bubble between life and death. But then you just so conveniently wrote a new law into existence…”
Nia pressed the blade harder. Momo could feel its poison tip on her skin.
“The law that finally elevated my true mother to power. That gave her the opportunity to finally pluck us from that prison and give us a second chance at doing this right…”
The tip of the knife felt like a lawnmower on raw skin. Momo tried swallowing down the pain, but her grip was wavering. She wouldn’t be able to fight Nia off on pure strength alone for much longer.
Wait.
She looked down to Nia’s feet. They weren’t moving. Even with the blade pressed to her throat, Momo had managed to keep her shoulders rotating at the very least, her hips circling. If she could just keep her flailing fish of a physical form moving for a little longer; keep Nia distracted for just another fleeting moment in time –
“You know, you’ve ruined my life as many times as you’ve saved it,” Nia said, the crisp, dry clay of her mask nearly pressed to Momo’s forehead. “I can’t decide if I should kill you or thank you, really. So I’ll settle for both.”
Nia pressed with all of her bodyweight, and Momo’s grip gave in.
“Thank you,” Nia said. Momo could practically hear her smiling. “Thank you for everything.”
The jagged metal edge pierced Momo’s flesh just as Devola tapped the microphone, causing an overwhelming static noise to fill the area.
“Slythorn has been disqualified for a lack of dancing,” Devola announced, her voice as clear and revealing as daylight. “Queen Momo wins.”
“Wait, what?”