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| Tweet Topic Started: Mon Jun 3, 2013 11:06 am (165 Views) | |
| Lady Eko | Mon Jun 3, 2013 11:06 am Post #1 |
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TLDR Summary (click to toggle) "No! Just run away, Ansha!" There was no getting to the dog in this state. Her monstrous hackles were raised, lips pulled back and trembling to reveal double jagged teeth. Ansha had just finished ripping apart one of Eko's pursuers and was eying up the others. Eko heard the animal's big body thump clean into someone, followed by the sickening sounds of flesh tearing and bones cracking. The girl slid around a corner, covering her retreat by overturning trash bins, crates, and anything else in her way. Eko's heart sank when she heard Ansha yelp, followed by the sounds of people crashing through her obstacles. The alley started to run out. Nowhere to hide. Wall too tall to jump. Wait-- Eko ducked into a crack in the wall of an abandoned building. It wasn't wide enough. She wrenched the wooden planks open using her bloody knife as an improvised crowbar, but the squeeze was still tight enough to be painful. A pit formed in her stomach when she realized that she had abandoned Ansha in the dead end. Her timing had been impeccable. There was an explosion of light behind Eko that forced her to shut her eyes as tightly as they could go. Had she waited a second longer, her skin would have been fried off. Had Ansha not been there to delay the Radiant for just a few more seconds, Eko would be dead. In spite of herself, the upstart felt her throat clench with a mixture of gratitude and sheer horror at the possibilities of what happened to her dog. This was quickly replaced by anger. She felt it coil in her gut. It spurred her to plan her next move with surprising clarity of mind. Eko's new surroundings were dark, moist and empty. There were sounds of people rushing around the back, light flashing through the slits in the wall every time their Radiant moved. Based on the rapid-fire voices outside, she estimated about three or four were left. Eko found a dark, hidden room in the corner. All its furniture and even its door was gone, but she had to rest and this was as good a place to hide as any. Eko hugged her knees on the floor, staring into the pitch darkness, feeling way too many things at once. She wished she was just part of the darkness: some kind of entity made of nothing but darkness-particles, only seen when she wanted to be seen. It was such a silly thought that Eko wondered why it even came to mind. She reminded herself to focus. They would probably find her soon. A cursory check of her body revealed that her left arm indeed couldn't move even if she tried to with all her might. Her leg was still okay for running in these kinds of circumstances, though. All her cuts stung badly and bled too much, and she hesitated trying to decide whether bandaging them was worth the time. Now that her life wasn't immediately in danger, Eko felt the lightheadedness of blood loss setting in. She decided to use pieces of her jacket to tie up the worst hits: the gashes on her face and a big one on her chest. There was nothing she could do about all the burns crisscrossing her body. The team fanned out to search all the nearby buildings, cursing and calling her a "slimy little Dancer" in the process -- whatever that meant. Eko managed to get her weapon fixed over her fist before an impact near the front entrance turned her stock still and silent. Footsteps creaked over the rotting floorboards, slowly. Please don't be the Radiant. Please don't be the Radiant. Please don't be the Radiant. Eko curled up even tighter, anticipating the worst by covering her face with her arms and knees. A disc of steel rested over one of her fists, secured to an awkward goblin contraption. She tried to tame her out of control breathing. Lights burst in the main room, casting long brief shadows on the little side-room she was in. A woman with sun-tanned skin and sun-bleached brown hair walked by. Eko knew she would be discovered immediately, but some primitive instinct told her to stay perfectly still regardless. She even held her breath. The Radiant wore practical Balefire clothing, but her skin was covered in glowing gold markings which Eko spotted out of the narrow gap in her fingers. The Radiant came to a stop in front of the side-room's entrance. She poked her head in and didn't appear to see anything. When it looked like she was going to move on, Eko released her breath. The Radiant paused at the doorway, contemplative. She blasted a hole through the wall, for a moment filling the whole area with unbearably bright light. Eko screamed and ran for the exit. The Radiant looked surprised, unable to properly protect herself against a punch to the knee as her target slipped away. The steel disc on Eko's contraption thundered outward, breaking the kneecap. "You won't get anywhere by hiding!" the woman half-growled, half-shouted. She mumbled the incantation for a healing spell, propping her weight on her other leg. Eko bolted for the front door and took several smaller light beams to the back in the process. Faltering, it felt like an eternity to reach the front entrance, which opened up to a poorly traversed outer city road. Three of her assailants converged on her. She was trapped. "Ansha!" Eko's voice cracked from desperation more than anything. A middle-aged man easily knocked her down. Eko realized that none of them looked like they were from around here. A Radiant was certainly out of place, but this other man dressed like a foreign bounty hunter. Eko tried to fight back, but they pinned down the arm that had the goblin-made contraption secured to it. "Ansha!" She realized after her second shout that one of her pursuers had disappeared within the last few seconds. Someone out of her field of view made a dying gurgling sound that caught the attention of both the middle-aged man and the Radiant, who was limping out of the abandoned house's doorway. Eko felt the weight on her arm let up as the man rose from his crouch, hand going to his sword. Droplets of blood fell on Eko's face. He died before he could even draw his weapon. The killing cut was from a long, curved Nalaian knife. Very clean. Almost frighteningly so. "Get up." Eko recognized the voice and obeyed at once. The black-robed figure drifted around her, likely in order to block her body from the Radiant. Now standing in the light of the enemy woman's tattoos, it was clear just who was protecting Eko. She was a girl a few years older than Eko, maybe, or at least a few inches taller. They resembled each other, though the robe-wearer lacked Eko's distinctive facial scars and dark circles under the eyes. Her features looked more Nalaian, especially paired with the weapons she was carrying: a dark grey katana in one hand, a long knife in the other, both bloody. The Radiant sneered at this new arrival, placing a hand on her hip. "I could have killed you three times over in all this time you've hesitated, girl. Well? What are you going to do?" "I was not hesitating. This was me giving you a chance to run." Eko looked at that blade closer. It was nothing like the wooden one she used to carry around all the time when they were kids. Real steel -- if it was even that. The color was too dark to be steel, it had no sheen to it, and the whole surface of the blade was covered in raised ridges that looked like battle scars. Its edge didn't even look sharpened. The robe-wearer kind of shuddered. "Is she worth it?" Eko had no idea who she was mumbling to, but the Radiant thought she was the one being addressed. "Of course. Why would I bother otherwise?" the woman gave a brief, odd-sounding laugh. "If you're buying time for her to escape, you should turn around and see that she's not moving an inch. Either attack me or let me by so I can--" Eko flinched as, within another heartbeat, the Radiant crashed onto her back and slid a few feet into the abandoned building. The dark robe was already bearing down on her, katana tip pressed into her gut. "What's this? Your sword is dull." "Please leave. I have important business with Eko. You can resume your hunt when I am done with her." This just made the woman crack up after a short moment of surprise. "Harsh! Aren't you her big sister? You have to be. Nalaian, swordsman, looks boring... you could just try to kill me, you know." "Do you yield or not?" she interrupted, still sounding patient somehow. "No need to chat about it. Just answer." "Fine. I yield." The Radiant slid out from under the swordpoint and dusted herself off once she was back on her feet. Glaring at Eko over the robe-wearer's shoulder, her form burst into a cloud of light particles. Eko flinched, looking every which way, and spotted the Radiant appear within the lantern-light far down the road, running away. "...Ari?" Eko asked the approaching girl. Her big sister calmly placed the tip of her katana over the scabbard and pushed it in. Never once during the whole exchange did Bethari lose her constant state of what Eko thought to be genuine tranquility. Her sister had the manner of someone who was truly subdued, unlike Eko who brimmed with emotion just beneath the surface. Everything about it was just so effortless. Annoyingly so. There had to be something to make her crack. "Why did you save me?" "You are going to help me with something." As she cleaned her knife with a handkerchief, Ari directed her attention down the opposite end of the road and Eko followed her gaze. Limping around the corner was the distinctive blood-matted form of Ansha. The dog's head drooped. Eko ran as fast as she could to meet with her dog. Normally she would have overflowed with emotion, but in the presence of her sister she knew she needed to appear as disciplined as possible. Ari looked on with her hand resting on the end of her katana, impassive as usual. The door creaked loudly when Ari opened it. The inside was a one-room apartment, but it more resembled a hole in the wall. The few possessions within the room were scattered in a disorganized fashion across the floor. "You moved out?" Eko asked. "I was kicked out. In a sense." Ari sat on her supposedly animal-proof food storage canister. She took her katana out of her sash and leaned it against her leg. Always close. "Please take a seat. I need to explain what has happened since you abandoned the family." Somehow, Eko could detect in Ari's tone that she wasn't intending to scold Eko for what she did, or even seemed disapproving. Though she probably didn't necessarily approve of what Eko had done in the past few months, either. "Eko, you deserve to be killed for everything you have done." Well, apparently Ari's tone was a bit deceptive. "You have put our family in shambles. Everyone you are related to by blood now has a permanent stain on their reputation. To almost everyone in Sokolovsburg, we are untouchable." "But why?" "Why do you even ask that question?" Now she almost sounded and looked stern. Ari's intense eyes made Eko feel like she was looking into a mirror. "You executed your own brother in public. Everyone who knows about our family knows that you are not done with us. No. You have just started. Am I not wrong?" For once, Eko felt like she was on the defensive. Like she was a young girl again, getting disciplined by her big sister about running away from home. "They do not want anything to do with us. We who might attract you and your wars. I cannot even buy bread in the Beehive anymore." The implication here was that her family had moved away. Eko didn't suppose she could get away with asking Bethari where they'd gone. Even knowing that they'd moved, probably moved outside the Sokolovsburg borough, was a lot of very useful information. Ari was right on in guessing that Eko's killings had only just started with Dian. "You said you needed my help with something. Ordered, more like it. A reason big enough that you're not killing me with that fancy Nalai-sword right now. Or saved me in the first place." Her head tilted. "I will be blunt with my terms. This is a mutually beneficial agreement, so I doubt you will deny me." "Go on." "I know where Kasih is," Ari said. Kas, the youngest sister in their family, was a conniving little devil that Eko had been trying to locate for almost a year. "If you lend all your resources to helping me -- and we will need all of them -- then I will tell you where she is hiding." This was an opportunity of a lifetime. "But what's the catch?" "We must also agree to a non-aggression pact. If you go through with this alliance, I will leave Balefire peacefully and never pose a danger to your games. In return, you will not look for me." To Eko, that wasn't even a catch. She had spent countless nights worrying and worrying about what she would do with Bethari. Of all her siblings, Bethari had done the least damage, mainly because she, as the oldest of them all, had toiled with such different problems than the middle child Eko did. Her and Eko had fought and competed a lot, but Eko always looked at her as more of a terrifying enigma. Now she thought of her big sister as one of the biggest existing threats to her goals. She was either a prodigy with a sword or had received instruction in secret; either way, Ari was incredibly fast and lethal. There was no way Eko could fight her one-on-one, especially now that she had some kind of magical sword whose effects she couldn't observe or anticipate. "I accept. I promise to hold up all of these terms for as long as you do the same." Eko bowed her head. Why not? In the end, it was Eko who was gaining the most out of this. She thought. "So what do you need help with?" Bethari took a long breath, resettling herself. "You are going to help me trap and kill our father." |
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8:19 AM Jul 11

