The wampus cat looked up at the towering mountain of flesh and angry fanged testosterone that was the manticore, and shrank back, belly pressed flat to the grass and ears laid back, twin tails standing full mast with fur splayed out in petrified terror. If Freyja and the others could sense the violent intentions flooding out of this apex predator, then it was no surprise that an inferior feline could tell how obscenely outmatched it was. This was the power of a king.

The manticore caught a glance of the cowed puma thing, and wrinkled its nose distastefully.

"Pathetic. Taking charity from the hands of your own intended prey. You are a complete and utter disgrace to our ancestral tree. This forest doesn't need two lions, goodbye!"

The scorpion tail curled over and trained itself on the wampus cat, and all it could do was watch, paralyzed under the manticore's hateful glare.

Not this time. Freyja set her jaw, flashing back to Mason's coldblooded execution of the crippled bunyip. No one and nothing in our care dies before discharge, ever again!

Flames were left in the shapeshifter's wake as she peeled off, and the complex shook with a thunderclap as she caught the tail strike. The soil caved in under her feet, body soaked with steaming sweat as she gripped the stinger at its base with both hands. Black biceps were bulging, and lupine claws curled from her fingertips, digging into the chitin for a better grip. She felt like she was trying to hold up one of those descending ceiling traps in old campy adventure serials, her muscles burning and her bones quaking.

What nerve, blocking me. The manticore jutted its barb forward, springing and extending from the tail tip like a jet-propelled spear. It nailed Freyja in her right shoulder and sent her flying into the porch with a sound like a shotgun blast.

The time that elapsed between the manticore's first move, and the delayed effect striking Freyja, was roughly a second. Of everyone assembled, only Chikita and Cuppet were able to track Freyja's movement.

For the rest, they merely blinked, and then one of their allies crashed behind them.

Richie felt the wind - generated by Freyja's body blurring past him - blow his hair back. His eyes widened. "Huh?" he turned around and blanched at the sight of Freyja, her shoulder pierced and bleeding, slumped against the sliding glass door of the backmost apartment room. Her blood was trickling and pooling onto the concrete floor of the porch, like syrup, which in turn streamed down the lip onto the grass. Freyja sensed inherently that the venom contained blood-thinning properties, if only because her nose, even now under the phantom thrall of its alternate canine form, detected way too much of her own blood had been spilled.

"What the - Frey!" Richie's first instinct was to run to and help Freyja up.

"Stay where you are!" Freyja growled at Richie, her hackles raised.

Richie stopped dead in his tracks, stunned and confused.

"Don't either of you dare leave that fucked-up cat unguarded! Not till that monster is down!" she said, standing, leaning against the door and clutching her shoulder as it slumped, numbing up on her. Cuppy noticed that, for as hard as she had been slammed into the door, the glass should have shattered, and he wondered if his and Richie's talismans had held up and reinforced the threshold of their home. Whether it was because of Freyja's own demonic nature, or because the manticore itself had nearly 'breached' their home via Freyja was its own question.

Richie bit his lip and nodded. "Right."

Cuppy wordlessly nodded as well, and turned back to the manticore, his brother watching his back, not taking its eyes off the massive man-faced lion. Instinctively, Chikita and Holly kept their eyes trained on the beast as well. None of them realized it yet, but already they were keeping vigilant to always have eyes on the target when a teammate's back was exposed. No less than three pairs of eyes at a time was ideal.

The manticore's tail swished back and forth as the wampus cat found its strength and trotted behind Cuppy and Richie, shrinking back and cowering, meowing anxiously.

"Isn't this an interesting peek into the quirks of your human psychology?" the manticore chuckled. "Giving of yourselves freely to a thing that failed to eat you, after crippling it yourselves, no less. You disable a potential predator just so you can give it another chance to come back for you all over again? The fauna of this world must be ill-suited for survival if your species stand above them. There is nothing more backward in this world than charity."

Richie's eyebrows furrowed. "As a street rat, I resent that. But, as a person, I agree with you one hundred percent. But it doesn't matter, because I'm not in the gutter anymore. I can afford to be that stupid now, so why don't you just back off?"

"Yeah." Cuppy nodded emphatically. "I'm with stupid."

Cuppet nodded along with his brother.

Richie gave Cuppy some side-eye.

"What?" Cuppy asked.

The manticore grinned, bearing a nightmarish maw of dripping yellow fangs. "It isn't just this botched cousin of mine. I smell the blood and sweat of quite a few decent opponents on all of you. I respect your guts, if nothing else. So -" it reared up on its hind legs, pounding its chest like a gorilla.

"GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT! DON'T YOU DARE LET ME DOWN!!!" it roared, relishing the challenge.

Opposing entities. Living creatures locked in a desperate struggle for survival. Nothing was more fulfilling than basking in the adrenal high of pitting brutal animal nature against itself, fighting tooth and nail to the death. It had hoped that perhaps delaying the ice woman's death in the sewers long enough would perhaps give her time to replenish her strength, or else that the terror would create a hysterical surge at the last second. Of course, in a warped way, this could be considered charity too. So was letting the little mice talk amongst themselves for a bit before tearing them to shreds.

Oh well. Being oxymoronic was also built into the foundation of the species whose face the manticore wore. Perhaps somewhere in the distant past, they diverged from a common ancestor.

And the ultimate respect to one's lineage was to improve upon it. Such was evolution.

Richie's every cell was screaming at him to run away. Ever enigmatic and selective with their commentary and battle instinct, his dragons were silent on the matter this time. As such, the only counterbalance to the flight half of Richie's blaring fight or flight reflex was his willpower. He had proclaimed, of his own free will, to Cuppy and Freyja that this apartment complex was their home, and that they would defend it. Here was a challenge to that conviction.

There was nowhere to run. Richie was already home.

Just hearing that roar makes me want to shit myself. It's like knowing you're on the edge of a towering cliff, or staring up at the shadow of a mega tsunami. That's going to make it hard to fight. Gotta calm myself. Fuck, I really should have drank more of that sake after all.

The tail sprung, seemingly toward Holly, who gasped, but then curved sharply toward Richie. He dashed to the side to evade the sting, but found his reflexes mired in that exquisite animal terror. He wasn't able to activate his Level 2 properly, his legs jittering in and out of their enhanced speed stance, causing him to stumble. Cuppy had laid an intricate series of thin, silken-thread-like strings across the grounds and between the trees and porches, to detect sudden movements and vibrations. One string each connected he and his friends, plus Cuppet, to the intersection of webbing. The moment before the tail fired, he knew the flight path the sting would take. But even knowing that, he was barely able to tug the Richie string quickly enough to help the tattooed brawler sidestep the sting in time. The venomous barb grazed Richie's side, splitting open hip flesh as the tail zoomed past. Grass scattered under the wake of the tail's passing.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Freyja was still on the porch behind Richie, and now directly in the line of fire as the appendage kept going. However, it had lost some acceleration whiffing off of its initial target, and Freyja was already back on her feet. She sidestepped the hook, curling her wolfen claws and raising them overhead to sever the stinger before it could retract.

Holly, feeling the rush of wind from the curveball sting push her back a bit, pulled herself out of a daze and realized that there was an opening. However brief, there was a time lag between the tail extending and retracting. The muscles that powered the sting propulsion were far stronger than those needed to pull it back into attack position. This much was able to be inferred by the lack of sonic booms upon the retraction alone. She took a gunman's stance and trained her microwave pistol on the manticore, trembling fingers seeking the trigger.

Chikita circled around the manticore, Yukihana poised to slash the monster's quad. Cuppet flew overhead, wielding both scissor blades, one in each wooden hand.

Freyja thrust down to grab and break the stinger in her claws. However, the retraction, while slower than the extension, was fast enough. Freyja latched only onto the tip of the stinger and, having no anchor point, was taken along for a ride.

"HOLY SHIT!" she screamed as the tail slingshot itself back into prime position, flinging her into the air.

Cuppet broke off, weaving past the whipping tail, and caught Freyja in a bridal carry, landing on a high tree branch.

Richie clutched his side, hissing, and covered his eyes against the sun as he looked up to see if Freyja had landed safely.

Cuppy's Freyja string broke, and the fine web he had laid was inadvertently tangled around Chikita as she moved in to slash the manticore. Her movements were slowed, and it felt like Yukihana was caught in something.

The beast's fine-tuned ears picked up Holly's finger squeezing the trigger, and he reared up on his hind legs again, standing like a bear before Holly fired the microwave shot.

A cylindrical red-orange beam, once again, punched through Chikita's torso, leaving no external wound but burning her insides.

"FUCK!" Chikita crumbled, clutching her burnt stomach.

Holly covered her mouth with her hand.

"Sorry." she said.

Inwardly, Yukihana whistled.

Shot by the same attack through your exact same target area as last time. What were the odds?

Cuppy disengaged his web.

No good. I can't keep track of all these variables, my web will just get in the way. he took a crouched stance, drawing thick strings between his fingers as he first clasped his hands, then drew them apart.

Freyja crouched on the branch, hackles raised and flaming. She opened her fanged mouth, face wrinkled across the bridge into wolfen flesh that shadowed her eyes, and shot a screaming fireball at the manticore from above. At the same time, Cuppet dropped down from the branch, joints making clockwork noises as steam hissed from between them, and spun toward the manticore with both swords extended, like a bladed top on steroids.

Above me. the manticore swung its tail to intercept the flame. It exploded to embers on the slick pleated armor, smaller flames scattered and burning holes in the lawn. Holly's microwaves were able to bypass the impenetrable shield of the thing's tail by cooking it from the inside out, but Freyja's fire only scuffed it. She had been aiming for the manticore's back in the first place, so she could infer that the beast used its tail for defense as well as offense. It lifted a paw over the passing Cuppet, batting him off course and toward his brother, who thankfully stopped the whirling blender in his tracks with a snap of his puppeteer fingers; Cuppet reverted to manual mode before he could crash into his flesh and blood counterpart. The wampus cat squeaked behind Cuppy. Cuppet gave a wordless thanks to his bro for stopping him.

The manticore lashed its tail into the trees, shattering branches to wood chips and dropping Freyja, shrieking, to the forest floor. Using the whiplash of his tail as startup momentum, the manticore kept spinning, swiping his right paw into Holly and tossing her a few dozen feet. When its back was to the reeling Chikita, the manticore kicked her with both legs like a mule, sending her rolling as well. Completing the turn, the manticore faced Cuppy again, and lunged its tail to skewer the little runt.

But something was off. Where was the dragon boy?

Cuppy sidestepped the tail, trapping it in a wiry snare, the strings wrapped around the posts and anchor points at Cuppy's back and over the roofs. He knew it wouldn't hold, but he just needed to buy a few seconds. He reactivated Cuppet's autopilot, and handed off the reigns to the snare trap while he aimed his slingshot. A volley of three gray pellets flew at the manticore, who tutted dismissively. They exploded to blinding, thick gray haze, like soupy smog, that shrouded the beast, blinding his eyes and his nose.

Smoke bombs. Very clever. the manticore conceded.

He gave a surprised grunt as a microwave shot cut through the smoke and burned his back leg, forcing him into a crouch. Then, Cuppy's weighted float ball parted the smoke from straight ahead. Before impact, it chicken-necked side to side, as Cuppy had done before in order to confuse and land a direct hit on Luchesi.

The manticore simply leaned out of the way of the wired projectile, splitting the smokescreen in its wake. He parted the rest with a swipe of his massive paws, and snagged the fishing line. Cuppy grinned as the wire wrapped around the paw, binding it, and the ball kept going, veering off and away toward Chikita.

I see. Tie up his limbs. Chikita raised Yukihana, allowing the end half of Cuppy's wire to wrap and hook around the blade, then plunged it into the ground and stomped her foot on the hilt.

I was not meant to be used this way! Yukihana complained.

Before the manticore could try to pull its tail and leg free of the traps, Freyja came out of nowhere, wielding a flaming log like a baseball bat, and shattered it across the manticore's jaw. His senses were thrown into disarray.

Perfect. Cuppy thought. A hit to the side of the jaw dizzies human opponents. Since he has a human face, looks like that applies to him too. He'll be dazed for a moment.

Cuppy lashed his pole to the ground and took the scissor blades from his bro, leaving him in charge of holding the tail since he was much physically stronger than Cuppy himself. Turning either edge face up toward the manticore, Cuppy jumped in a corkscrew from beneath, parting thickets of lion mane and slashing the manticore across the chest. It grunted in response as Cuppy landed near Holly.

"Get some distance and pressure him with shots. You're our sniper today." Cuppy told Holly.

"Roger." she nodded.

"Oh!" Cuppy stiffened.

"What?" Holly asked, startled.

"Why did I get a B on my last paper?" he asked the former Miss Yule.

"Who cares?!" Holly retorted in disbelief.

From above, Richie was crouched on the duplex roof like a lion himself.

Good work. he blanched, his stomach in knots.

From up here, he wasn't so terrified of the manticore. It was edged out by dizzying vertigo, probably the only time a situational fear of heights cleared one's head - long enough to concentrate.

Richie's dragon runes awakened, glowing bright azure, and began twisting and hissing as he activated Level 4.

One of his dragons wrapped its serpentine body around Richie's leg, its rock-solid head enveloping Richie's foot like a crocodile skull bludgeon. Richie steeled his nerves and leapt as high off the roof as he could. The sun caught his back, framing his misty blue silhouette like a strange eclipse. He flipped forward as he fell, somersaulting three, five, eight, twelve times before he was within ten feet from impact with the top of the manticore's skull. His leg shot out, ready to drop its heel down like a hammer stroke in the ultimate ax kick.

Resolute Smash

The super-armored heel came down on the dome of the manticore's skull like a divine mortar shell. There was a tremendous, cathartic crack that resounded throughout the forest, and the monster's jaws were slammed together so hard that a fang each from the upper and lower mandible broke off and went flying. Twin spurts of blood erupted from the beast's nostrils like crimson geysers. It was forced down, by the head, into the lawn. Off balance from its bound limbs and pinpoint injuries, its face was driven into the dirt as the ground sank in under the weight of paws which failed to stand up to the might dropped from above. Tufts of grass flew as the beast's face and chest pressed into the caved lawn, its legs buckling from under it.

Richie smirked - then howled in pain, clutching at his knee as he fell onto his back.

"FUCK!" he summarized.

The recoil from this attack was evidently unpleasant.