Flecks of fire scattered, slashed to bits by the stroke of steel claws. Rose petals of blood fluttered up toward the sky, framed by the lofty moonlight above Freyja. Her dislocated arm, free of the destroyed sling, flailed limply at her side as she was thrown backward off of the high tree branch. Four cuts spread across her chest. Her eyes fell on the glowing moon. It looked so beautiful tonight.
Freyja’s unconscious body landed in the tall grass, laying it flat and imprinting her shape into the soft muddy soil. The jester looked down on her, an eyebrow raised at the mildness of the wounds he dealt her. His eyes caught another shimmer in the lunar light, and his gaze tracked a line of silver from his claws to the puppeteer still on the ground, holding his fishing rod. Cuppy had snared the jester’s claws again, this time the float ball dangling like a cheeky ornament from between the jester’s forcibly clasped hands. It almost looked as though he were frozen in prayer.
The jester’s eyes locked onto Cuppy, stirring softly like the swift undercurrent of a seemingly peaceful babbling brook.
“You disrupted my blow by yanking my claws back. How cruel.” the jester looked back at Freyja’s prone form, matting the grass. “It would have been more humane to let me rip her chest open. Now she’ll just suffer more. What do you mean to accomplish by blocking me? Neither one of you are leaving this forest alive anyway.”
Cuppy gripped the reel. “Don’t decide that on your own.” he glared back at the jester, returning the ire in his eyes.
The jester looked at the wire binding his hands together, and saw that the minute fishing hook snagged an intersection of line at three points, one for each barbed prong, like a neat little bow on top of a delicately-wrapped present. He giggled.
“So, what are we going to do now, little boy?” he asked.
Cuppy yanked hard on the pole with everything he had, having disabled the limitations imposed on his muscle capacity by his own brain with an injection of strings that temporarily rewired his neural connections. He had essentially cast off the self-imposed instinct that confines humans to using only a quarter of their full strength at best, for fear of not ripping muscle from bone, or snapping bones in half under the weight of their own animalistic raw strength. Cuppy was dimly concerned he might tear his own body limb from limb, but it had come down to that now anyway, it seemed. Do or die.
The jester was not prepared to be yanked with the kind of hysterical strength popularly attributed to screaming mothers throwing minivans off of their pinned children, and was flung from the high branch down toward Cuppy.
“Get down here!” Cuppy shouted.
The jester felt the frigid wind of the night whipping his face through the eye holes and sides of his plaster mask, and felt his instincts scream at him to bring his hands up to cushion his landing or help redirect his angle and trajectory midair. But his arms were the means by which he was being dragged through the air, and were helpless to protect their master. The jester’s face was pressed into the unyielding trunk of a thick tree as his arms were pulled to the side by the line. His shoulder and hip followed, striking hard. The resounding crack echoed through the forest, sounding triumphant and cathartic in Cuppy’s ears.
His hook and line came away from the jester’s claws and returned to his side, and the jester fell from the imprint of himself he had left in the trunk, a straight plunge thirty feet down. There were jagged rocks, like the kind Forest’s back had been broken upon, at the bottom here. Cuppy watched the jester fall with hope glimmering in his eyes that this would be the end, and that the jester had been finished off in one multi-purpose stroke.
Go on, fall and crack your head open, you jerk! Cuppy thought, his internal voice making little echoey noises as it bounced around the airy interior of his mind.
No more than five feet from the bottom of what would have been a straight dive into the rocks with the top of his skull, the Jester suddenly flipped over backward, his legs landing on either jutting stone in a deep cat-like crouch, claws stabbed into the ground. His masked face was staring at Cuppy, slightly cracked around the right eye hole. A thin stream of blood was leaking from that side of his mask, down his clavicle and into his checkered suit.
“I’m like a cat. I will always land on my feet.” the jester said to Cuppy. “But if it’s any consolation,” his voice lowered and deepened, “that fucking hurt.” he growled at the boy.
Cuppy, for his part, couldn’t really make this out, as his mind was reeling from the sudden depletion of adrenaline and endorphins that had fueled that last big tug. His intracranial strings had already snapped and dissolved out of his grey matter. He could tell that the strength he put into reeling the jester into the tree had torn the muscles in both of his arms, and they fell at his sides, numb and limp. As feeling slowly faded back into Cuppy’s limbs, he felt as though his arms had been painfully stretched over his head for many days, or pulled like taffy. His fishing pole inclined to the ground, only prevented from falling out of Cuppy’s tattered hands by the fact that it was literally sewn to them.
The jester dusted himself off and crossed his arms again, dangling those claws at his side like edged steel curtains. His long wormy tongue slithered out of the hole in his Comedy mask and licked the ribbon of blood running down his cheek and neck clean as he started sauntering toward Cuppy.
The boy slumped his back against a tree and struggled to hold his body up on thighs that felt cracked. He was trembling all over, clearly nerve-damaged as well.
“You look tired, why don’t you take a nice long rest?” the jester cooed.
Cuppy tried to lift his arms, and his fishing pole. They were dangling sandbags at the ends of overstretched rubber bands. He couldn’t get any strength in them at all. Between Cuppy and the advancing jester, Dean’s body lay in its surface grave. The jester stopped there a moment, planting his wooden clog-clad foot in the dead man’s face. He ground his foot into Dean’s head disdainfully.
“The only thing heroes and idealists do well is die horribly. So, I’ll reward you for your courage accordingly.” the jester hissed, then continued stalking toward Cuppy.
The boy looked with a burning gaze toward the jester, wanting nothing better than to smack him, but as long as his arms were dead weight, so too was his entire arsenal. Unless,
Cuppy seemed to vibrate as white strings shot straight up out of his hands, fingers, arms, elbows, neck, thighs, chest, and hips. The dozens of strings soared into the sky, whistling like fireworks, and looped themselves around the natural fork of an overhead tree branch with splayed, knobby limbs. The strings fell in a return stroke to Cuppy, dangling in front of his face and tickling his nose. He sneezed, fluttering the strings for a few moments before they returned to him, floating against the wind under the sway of Cuppy’s will. Cuppy opened his mouth wide and then slammed it shut, clenching his jaws around the ends of the strings in a single bundle that resembled a horse’s bridle of gossamer.
The jester tilted his head at this display. “What new trick do you have up your sleeve this time? Or are you just trying to stall for more time at this point?”
He crossed his claws together so that the blades threaded each other, then started gradually picking up speed, moving from an uncanny glide, to a trot, to a run, and finally to a blinding sprint, eager to plunge his claws into the supple meat of Cuppy’s body.
Cuppy only needed to be able to move his head, neck, and tongue. The strings grafted to his teeth and tongue within his mouth, and he nodded violently down with the bundle he had sewn to himself. His arms were jerked up, clutching the fishing pole close to his chest, and then cast the line far with another vigorous shaking of Cuppy’s head. His legs and hips moved in tandem, twisting to generate more kinetic energy moving toward his upper body. The muscles behind Cuppy’s shoulders were mechanically tensed, and his blond curls seemed to be frizzing up a bit and fluttering in the wind, as though his many strings had generated some kind of faint undercurrent of static electricity from brushing against each other and the fabric of his cloak.
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The jester veered to the left, dodging the hook and weighted float ball that Cuppy had tossed at him. Cuppy was undeterred and yanked his head back, jaw quivering as his tongue swirled within, curling string into itself. His teeth ground, looking almost like they should be kicking off sparks. Cuppy’s feet dangled off the ground for a moment when he yanked hard on the strings with his mouth, lifting with the crank and pulley lever physics of the roping he had rigged himself to. His biceps curled in instantly, and with a twist of his wrists, Cuppy whiplashed the fishing line back to himself, throwing it out past the tree trunk. He felt the line run out a hundred feet, narrowly passing between bunches of trees and brush, then thrashed his head and upper body about violently again. His manipulated arms tossed the pole forward again, sailing the line and lure at the jester.
The jester sidestepped the extended nautical flail once again, but was nonetheless astounded. Cuppy was actually puppetting himself as though he were a marionette as well, forcing his exhausted body to work even past the point of collapse when his withered hands could no longer hold weapons, and his trembling feet could no longer plant themselves steadily in the ground. However, with the shock of Cuppy’s resolve and ingenuity gotten over, the jester chuckled to himself again, and put more pep in his step, resuming his dead sprint to Cuppy. The gap was closing quickly now. Fifty feet, forty, thirty, twenty -
All the while, Cuppy continued to fling the fishing line bludgeon at the jester again and again, the swings and lashes becoming more rapid and violent the more adeptly Cuppy melded into his improvised self-piloting technique, lost in a frantic trance.
Fifteen feet from Cuppy, the jester was prepared to plunge his crisscrossed claws into the spaces between Cuppy’s ribs, then explosively uncross those claws to either side, tearing the boy’s body cavity open for ease of plucking out his organs, starting with the lungs and stomach. The maniac ran the grisly simulation through his sickened mind with dark glee and excitement.
Cuppy puppetted himself to cast the line a final time.
Doesn’t he get tired of trying the same thing every time and it not working? Give up already. the jester snickered. His eyes tracked the flying float ball in slow motion, cold, calculating, and precise like the predatory aerial gaze of a hawk sweeping over the fields for wayward rabbits. He could easily trace the trajectory of the plastic-like red and white condensed weight that was meant to hit him right between the eyes. He would simply move to the side again at the last second like he had before - there was no sense batting at the float ball and the line it was attached to just to risk getting his claws snagged again - and then reach Cuppy to tear him apart.
Cuppy chicken-necked his head from side to side, and his body jittered accordingly. A vibration echoed through the fishing rod and down the line. The wire then moved in jerky, spastic waves as though it had been a bungee cord that was given a gigantic pluck. The ultimate effect was that the float ball bounced around erratically as it flew toward the jester, leaving him frightfully unsure which direction to dodge in.
The maniacal killer’s eyes widened as he seemed to see a blurring shotgun burst of float balls, knowing that the multitude of afterimages were an illusion but still being intimidated. He had to jump backward and take a risk catching the flail head with his claws, entanglement be damned. His body lurched backward and he almost fell, his legs stuck up to their calves suddenly in something that felt incredibly hot and plasmatic. At his back, Freyja’s unconscious form had partially shifted all under its own instinct and muscle memory, teeth partially changed into canines that were grinding against each other as her corded throat let out a deep, low growl, her eyes rolled back inside her head and thus ghostly white and blank. She had conjured a fire construct at the jester’s feet, a pair of burning red clawed hands like those of a snarling beast that seemed to rise up out of a puddle of liquid fire. It looked like the paws of a demon breaching through the crust and skin of the earth from the Inferno deep below.
The jester looked back up from the fire hands that clutched his legs, burning them and holding him still, and watched as the forty pound float ball made its flight path known. The ball slammed into the jester’s mask, bashing it in and shattering the plaster mold to glass-like shards, akin to those of a dropped vase. The white chips went flying as the ball punched through and struck the jester solidly in his unprotected cheek, directly along the right side of his jaw. He felt little flecks of his broken mask nick his face around the bridge of his nose and just under his eyes, and felt the inside of his cheek tear against his teeth and be pounded into pulpy mush that would be sore for weeks. He felt his jaw rattle and almost crack slightly, dangerously close to dislocating and coming unhinged. A single tooth chipped itself, and the jester swallowed the liberated speck of enamel.
His head rocked back, and the prongs of Cuppy’s fishhook snagged the right conical branch of the jester’s headwear, biting into the fabric deeply and setting its jaws like a single minded ferocious pitbull driven to frenzy. When Cuppy yanked his line back, the hook ripped the conical hat right off of the jester’s head, freeing his hair to fall loosely amidst the cloud of dust that was his pulverized plaster Comedy mask. Blood squirted from the gap in his lips like a slammed packet of ketchup, and his cheek was already brutally swollen and deeply bruised. Drops of blood from the injury along the edge of his scalp and hairline where he had been yanked head-first into a tree trunk earlier were dislodged from the tips of his fluttering hair, flying off into the distance.
That was Cuppy’s best shot. His jaw went lax, his cluster of strings came undone and unfixed themselves from the branch above, and he collapsed down on his face into the dirt, ass sticking up as though he were shaking it to the air while unconscious. The fishing pole clattered to his side.
Before his limp eyes fell closed, Cuppy managed a good look at the jester, unmasked. He was shocked to see that the jester could only be a few years older than Freyja, Richie, and himself, maybe twenty flat if Cuppy were to guess. He had a quasi-angelic serene face with delicate features matching those soft, feminine blue eyes. His hair was blond and softly-textured, just like Cuppy's, but fell down straight in hanging locks rather than being curly in nature. Cuppy figured the man wore his hair shoulder length outside of his costume, which fit with how easily it was all swept back and concealed inside that ridiculous hat. In short, the killer looked perfectly beautiful, if not for the swollen cheek and split lip Cuppy had just given him. Given how self-absorbed the glorified bully was, Cuppy ventured a guess he was the vain preening type too, and felt choked belly giggles of satisfaction that he'd managed to dent the jester's image.
Neither of them realized it yet, but Cuppy had done a bit more than just give the jester a dent.
The unmasked man swooned drunkenly and deliriously on his long, graceful legs with their feet still clutched in burning fists. His vision was blurry, graying in and out. First Wilcox pistol-whipping him upside the head, then Dean shooting the crap out of him, and now this. It had been a while since the jester was on the receiving end of a helping of pain, and the memories that pain was linked to were unpleasant and hitherto repressed. While the former two grievances he had let go, knowing his own unstoppable nature when unequalled within his own domain, this flipping of the situation on his head was startling. He realized for the first time since he had put on the mask and claws that he was, however slightly, vulnerable outside the rejuvenating empathic dreamscape of the Backyards.
His eyes crossed, then slowly wandered back into focus, facing the right direction. He was annoyed to see the little moppet look as though he were sleeping like a baby after daring to strike him. The jester moved to raise his claws, but he was still dizzy and felt off-kilter, his arms just meekly swinging back and forth as though caught in the wind. His senses were drawn back into focus when he heard a hissing sound at his feet.
Looking down, the jester could see that Cuppy's fallen bag of tricks had spilled over, and those perfectly round explosive black pellets had rolled like marbles at the jester's feet. He counted twelve of them in total, starting to glow red under the heat of contact with Freyja's projected fire grip. They were all going to explode right in his fucking face in about two or three seconds.
The jester frowned.
"Touché." he said with a sigh of resignation, actually retracting his claws and giving a slow clap.
A tremendous booming flash of light crackled out through the forest, scaring the literal crap out of all nesting birds in a three mile radius.
-
Richie was lying on his back, still dazed, in the room at the top of the Sniper Tower, unknowingly awaiting an elixir Leon would administer to bring him back up into fighting condition. For some reason unknown to him, Richie had a happy little smirk on his face, as though he had just had a nice good stretch in the morning, working out some tight kinks. His ears seemed to pop a little.
Probably just the change in altitude.