Chapter Twelve Kion
Chapter Twelve
Kion
Panting in a mixture of fear, fury, and exertion atop Cato as cold rain beats down from the sky, Kion doesn’t see it at first.
He’s too focused on trying to reach those fucking glittering draconian jewels on the top of the siege tower, too focused on trying to save the only home he’s ever had from being torn apart by dissolution, too focused on praying to Merlin that it doesn’t start thunderstorming.
But this entire match is already a fucking shit show. Already, Cho has gotten them a purple card, their defense has failed to keep the Cockatrices out, and Bronte has required a Panacea after being brutally whipped in the face by a cockatrice’s serpent-like tail.
When he told Taissa to “show them how angry” she was, he did not mean “go ahead and get a purple card.”
It’s possible that half of this disaster is his own fucking fault.
Panic is clawing at his throat, and he can’t play any harder than he already is. Carriwitchet used to be his only refuge from the darkness inside of him. And now it’s ruined.
It’s not an athlete’s way of thinking, but he knows they’ve already lost. It’s as obvious as a bannik in a bathroom.
But it doesn’t mean he won’t go down fighting. Fuck, no. He’s Kion Locke.
Kion gnashes his teeth to prevent a primal, panicked roar from escaping him as he urges Cato to keep up with Knox’s stymph while they doze a path for them through the Cockatrices’ defense.
Go. Go. Go. Everything is a blur around him until Knox pulls up short, lurching to a sudden stop in the air.
Kion shouts out as Cato nearly collides with Robin, avoiding collision by only a slight millimeter. Maybe less.
“Tanaka!” he roars. “What—”
It’s only then that he realizes his words ring in a silent stadium.
The thin crowd, sparsely decked out in purple and silver for the Stymphs, and green and purple for the Cockatrices, is hushed in wonder and fear.
Kion, breathing hard, glances around him, looking past the cameras flying frantically through the air, past the roiling fog of the rain.
And his eyes widen.
What the fuck?
For one brilliant moment, the cockatrices hang suspended midair, beaks angled downward, yellow eyes heavy-lidded and beginning to flutter closed.
Their serpentine tails droop limply, and their dark wyvern wings have stopped beating altogether.
Atop their backs, their warlocks and witches are ashen-faced and bewildered, attempting to wake the creatures by tugging on the cockatrices’ red combs and jerking the reins.
It’s no use.
One by one, the cockatrices begin to drop from the darkening sky like stones.
Screams erupt in the stadium as the unconscious Wingeds hurtle downward.
It takes Kion a long stupefied second to make sense of the scene before him—the cockatrices plummeting like boulders off a mountain, plunging toward the field, and the arena, below.
Merlin’s tits, is all he can think, frozen in bewilderment and horror atop Cato. Merlin’s fucking hairy tits.
A scream, shrill and shrieking, beyond what any mortal lungs could summon, jerks Kion out of his stupor.
The scream is almost layered onto itself, distorted and filled with so much mourning that it nearly makes him sick.
It cuts through the air like a hot knife through flesh, tearing the seams of the world apart with its grief. A banshee. Somewhere below.
That means only one fucking thing.
Death.
It settles. Quickly, into his brain. The whys and the hows don’t seem to matter right now.
Not when there are massive beasts crashing toward a screaming audience, and their riders are falling toward certain death.
With a grunt, he tells Cato exactly what he needs him to do.
As Taissa speeds by him on that elderly stymph, he knows she’s got the same idea.
Torrents of cold, cold rain crash around them in a blur, as Cato angles his beak downward into a dive, a picture-perfect Arrow Drop.
Kion grits his teeth, grateful for his Shielding glyph as the wind threatens to tear at his eyes.
All around him, his team is also angling into the Arrow Drop, Knox shouting curses atop Robin.
Like dark shards of ice they fall from the sky, chasing after the unconscious cockatrices and the unlucky witches and warlocks atop them.
Kion grits his teeth, his eyes on the plummeting Winged closest to him: the team’s captain, Jillian Bart.
She’s passed out, he realizes, squinting his eyes and taking in her limp body and lolling blonde head.
It’s probably only thanks to the straps of the saddle, combined with her Balance glyph, that she hasn’t fallen off yet.
He isn’t stupid. There’s no way that seventy-one stone Cato can catch a two-hundred-stone cockatrice and take the impact. But Cato can catch Jillian.
They’re close now. At least there’s that. But the ground isn’t so very far away, either.
“Into an Undertow,” he tells Cato as he squeezes him with his legs, and the stymph obliges, transitioning from an Arrow Drop into the move that’ll allow them to swoop underneath one of the cockatrice’s wings and fly level with its stomach.
Kion hisses through his teeth, trying not to look at the approaching ground, and instead unbuckles himself from his saddle and launches upward, just as he once saw Cho do.
Only he doesn’t have the fucking Luck glyph. No time to ink it on.
The air currents fight against him, pushing him up and then shoving him down.
If not for his Balance glyph, he’d fall off the cockatrice’s massive, rain-slick back instead of staggering to a landing on it like he does.
His hands are sweating as he unbuckles Jillian’s saddle and hauls her upward. “Cato!”
“Jump! Hurry!” His stymph sounds frightened. Not a good sign. Cato is never scared.
Kion doesn’t let himself second-guess anything as he leaps off the cockatrice and into the air, onto Cato’s back. His heart squeezes as a spiraling cockatrice casts a shadow over them, and he quickly veers Cato to the left. The screams are growing louder.
Merlin save them.
This is going to be a massacre.
Around him, his teammates are snatching as many players from their cockatrices as they can. One for each of them. Kion, pulling Cato back, looks around panicked for Taissa. There. She’s there, the Cockatrices’ Bailer slung over her bird’s back. Across the field, their eyes meet.
Just as a resounding boom shakes the ground below them.
The first cockatrice has made impact, shattering a part of the field into a deep, dark crater. Onlookers are fleeing from the stands, trampling one another to a pulp. There’s nowhere to land, not without the threat of being crushed.
“Go!” Kion cries to Cato as he catches sight of Mahina struggling to jump from the cockatrice and onto her stymph, Kahoali.
Kahoali is desperately attempting to keep level with the cockatrice as they approach ground, but the distance between stymph and rider is too wide.
“MAHINA!” roars Kion as Cato drops below the cockatrice. “YOU HAVE TO JUMP! NOW!”
With a terrified nod, Mahina leaps off the cockatrice with the other player, who’s screaming his head off.
Kahoali caws in distress as Mahina falls through the gray sky, but Kion’s there.
He’ll always be there for his team. Mahina lands with a thump on Cato’s back, grabbing the back of his saddle to steady herself.
Thank Merlin. Thank Merlin.
BOOM. Another impact. Clods of dirt spray up into the air. Kion is shaking as he urges Cato up, dodging the falling Wingeds, trying to find some safe airspace. Dragging the Cockatrice player with her, Mahina leaps back onto Kahoali just as the third crash rattles the world.
The falling Wingeds are low enough now that there’s no risk of being crushed as Kion pulls Cato level in the air, breathing hard. His vision swims.
BOOM. BOOM.
The bleachers have been hit. He closes his eyes, shaking hard, as the screams abruptly quiet. He can smell blood in the air, thick and viscous and warm—
Blood was running down his back. It felt thick and hot. When it trickled down his spine to the other cuts, it almost helped them feel better.
“The monster’s crying! The monster’s crying!”
There was blood in his mouth, too. He spat it out, but it mixed with mucus and hung from his mouth like a second tongue. His tormentors laughed even harder.
And then the belt came down again.
—Kion gasps as the world shakes, drawing him back to the present. But this time, what’s before him is even worse than the past.
Below him is a bloodbath.
Nine cockatrices scatter the field, in deep craters, in the shredded ruins of the stands.
Survivors scream in the wreckage, the banshee continuing to wail, a young woman with white hair and hands stained red from all the blood.
A black dog, a church grim or maybe a barghest, stands next to her, sniffing the death-tainted air.
He feels…numb. Numb to his core as Cato lands on the smoking field.
He slides off him on trembling legs, laying Jillian on the ground before he staggers, then runs to the ruins of the stands.
Part of him knows it’s too fucking late, that there was nothing he could do in the first place, but he still tries to find any survivors that haven’t fled.
What he finds instead is this.
Someone’s purple-and-silver Stymphs’ beanie in a puddle of red blood and wet gore.
A goblin family, pierced to death by the bleachers’ metal shards. The father’s stout body is on top of the others. He was trying to shield them.
One qyl, shattered and broken. The owner had been halfway through a panicked glyph that Kion can’t make out. The arm is bloodied beyond recognition.
A small hand stretching out from underneath the massive body of a cockatrice. It’s the size of a child’s hand. Tiny. With purple-painted little nails.