A Masterpiece of Death and Color #2
I swore he’d been several feet away still heading along, but. . .Yoichi zipped forward and ripped off the man’s head with his bare fingers so fast I shuddered unsure of how he could do that. So fast. . .I wished I had told the twins to change their kitsune masks and not chuckle at him further.
And then the Silent Ones sped ahead of the Claws and Fangs, shocking us all. Their red hooded capes lifted as they ran, and within three strides they were no longer running at all.
They were damn near flying.
Oh.
The lead figure planted one foot against a fallen log and launched into the dark air above the field.
I caught a quick glimpse of her long gray hair and knew it was a woman.
The red cape opened behind her like wings.
She cleared fifteen feet of grass without touching the ground.
Her hood went back into place, swallowing it into shadow.
Then, she landed on a man with a rocket launcher.
He dropped the huge weapon.
A blade flashed once from beneath her red cape, and the man's head was gone from his shoulders. The Silent One had already pushed off the falling body and landed on another before the first body hit the grass.
Two more red figures came up behind her and even used the dying man's body as a stepping stone. The other picked up the rocket launcher and began blasting some of Akiro’s troops.
Fuck yeah.
Akiro's men started screaming.
And the Silent Ones who had somehow got to the men before everyone, were easily removing the threat of the rocket launchers. Each kill was so fast and so clean that the field could barely keep up with how many launcher-bearers and mine-placers were already dead.
Reo’s gaze darted from side to side. “Seven launchers down. No. Eight.”
Kenji bobbed his head. “The mine-placers stopped placing mines. Some of them are running away.”
I grinned. “But, most of them are dying.”
Perhaps, I’ll accept the Silent Ones’ apology after all.
I took in the wider field.
The whole of it had become chaotic motion.
To my left, Toma had reached the all-red assassin and the two of them collided in a flash of curved blades and ogre horns. Sparks lit up between them. Steel met steel three times in two seconds.
In the center, Kaoru was a blur of pink hair around violet. He moved like he was dancing with a partner who didn’t yet know they were going to die.
Further out, Rin walked through enemy soldiers in a bored stroll. Men who came within reach of his braids or tried to grab him, fell directly to their knees gasping. Rin stabbed them in the chest as he passed without breaking stride.
Some guy shot Rin’s way.
Rin turned, blurred to the man, and whipped his hooked braid at his neck. The sharp tip slashed at his eye.
The man screamed in horror, dropping his gun, and crumbling to the ground. Next his skin began to bubble grotesquely. Tons of bumps appeared along with green pus.
Ugh. . .that’s so fucking disgusting.
Rin nodded at the man and continued on, not even stabbing the poor guy out of his misery.
What the fuck did he put on those braids tonight?
Finally, the Scales had hit the front of Akiro's ranks like a wave. The red, black, and gray of the Scales swallowed the enemy line whole—one moment there was open grass between the two forces, the next there wasn't.
And then bodies folded into each other at the point of impact, masks and faces blurring together until it was impossible to tell where our people ended and Akiro's began.
It was like watching a fucked up painting come to life, with each stroke of violence creating a new masterpiece. There was this sick beauty in the clash of colors and chaos, in the symphony of screams, gunshots, and steel hitting steel.
In the death of it all, hitting both sides.
Ghosts rose into the night air.
Dozens of ghosts. They climbed out of their falling bodies on the field as rippling smoke in human shape. Wispy. Pale. Carrying the wounds that had ended their life.
A Scale lifted out of his own body with his throat opened wide. The wound stayed with him as he rose. The wet red of it had become a thin silver line of mist that hung at his neck like a torn necklace.
One of Akiro's men climbed out of his corpse with the left side of his face gone. His ghost looked around for the missing half. His right eye blinked.
A man rose without a chest. The hole in him was wide enough that the moonlight passed straight through where his heart had been, and on the other side of the hole I could see the field continuing through his body.
Another rose with a hand missing.
Another with both legs gone, his ghost climbing upward in a slow seated posture as if his body had forgotten he no longer had anything to sit on.
A Scale ghost with bullet holes across his vest drifted up with the holes still steaming. Six of them. He looked down at himself, counted them slowly with his eyes, and then turned his face toward the moon.
The new ghosts continued to rise.
So many.
The air above the field filled with wispy figures floating.
Then the right side of the field erupted.
Someone must have stepped on a mine.
The explosion lifted a column of dirt, grass, and red mist twenty feet into the air. The shockwave hit my chest a half-second later, and the earth under my boots punched once, hard.
Bodies tumbled.
Masks flew.
A man came down out of the cloud with his arm pointing in the wrong direction.
A second explosion went off on the left.
Dirt rained sideways across the field. Smoke billowed thick and gray and ate the moonlight in a wide circle. Through the haze I caught the brief silhouettes of men diving for cover or being thrown by the blast.
Fuck.
Reo cursed beside me. "Two mines down. Eight to go."
A third explosion blew open the grass on the far right.
A fourth went off near the west of the field.
The ghosts must be real.
Yet, the living fought on, and the grass beneath them became trampled open and the dark green soon shimmered wet with red and the scents of sweat, death, and blood rode the wind.
I could now taste the war in the back of my throat.
Then, another person stepped on a mine and the blast threw bodies into the air, and the ghosts of the men inside those bodies rose too—the dead and the debris parting in arcs in the dark sky.
No. Those were Scales that died.
My chest tightened.
I searched around for the Fangs and Claws and caught a flash of pink hair through the smoke.
Okay. Kaoru is still alive. Thank you.
Then, I captured a gleam of white and swinging hooked braids taking men out through the dust.
Rin.