Nanowrimo Day 28
The two advanced in unison, and as they did, a third figure joined them, masked and wearing dark colors as well.
"Now!" the first girl yelled. And together, the three of them ran at the bloodthirsty man, hacking away.
Tamara remembered what had happened when she'd tried to slice through the bloodthirsty man's arm. She went for his torso this time, focusing on peeling away shallow stripes of obia. With the others to the bloodthirsty man's sides, it couldn't regenerate quickly enough to replace what it had lost. Soon she was reaching that dense inner layer, peppered with obia hearts.
She sliced into them, making two parallel lines down the center of the bloodthirsty man, taking out what must have been dozens of hearts at one go. The bloodthirsty man lunged toward her, its obscene mouth opened wide, but she was already ducking away from it, and then the other girls' spear was lodged in its head, forcing it back.
"More!" the third girl yelled.
Tamara twirled her swords, adjusting her grip. The bloodthirsty man was laid open in front of her, obia hearts ripe for the taking. All she had to do was puncture them.
Each time, the bloodthirsty man jerked, but they had it in hand. The other girls held back its head and right arm, and its left arm was being taken care of with the pistols and arrows. Tamara was able to focus on what she loved best: destroying obia.
After some unimaginable number of hearts, the bloodthirsty man began to convulse, its form becoming amorphous.
"I think it's coming apart!" someone shouted.
Tamara took a few more stabs, and sure enough, the bloodthirsty man writhed some more, and then exploded, obia flying in all directions.
"Quickly!" she shouted. "While they're stunned! We can probably get all of them!"
She pivoted on her heel. Behind her, Candace had moved, or been moved, so there was nothing between her and the obia lying at the other end of the street. She was there in mere seconds, hacking away. They barely put up any fight at all, and when she looked up, she could see that her compatriots had dispersed them with equal speed.
"Is that it?" Tamara shouted. "Where's Candace?"
Candace had indeed been moved away, to a side street. Obol had torn his own clothes and wrapped a bandage around her wrist, and now she was sitting shivering on the ground, staring at nothing. Tamara grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet.
"What are you doing?" Brittany screeched. "Don't move her!"
"Find me a doorway," Tamara shouted back. "She might heal if I take her back to our side."
Brittany frowned. "I don't think it... well, I guess it's worth a shot. Mud?"
"This way," Mud said, emerging from the wreckage. "'S not too far."
Candace didn't really offer any resistance, allowing herself to be pulled along by Tamara. She was still shivering, though, and her lips were turning blue.
Tamara kept up a running, murmuring commentary. "It's fine," she said quietly. "It'll be just fine. Just a little bit further. I know it sucks, but we're almost there." Candace didn't react at all to it, and Tamara wasn't even sure if she'd heard her.
"Here," Mud said, stopping in front of a doorway, but she swore when she tried the door. "Locked, sorry," she said.
"Doesn't matter," Tamara said. She only had to touch the door and think of Candace's house, and in just a moment they had slipped in.
It was strange and jarring, going from the dim twilight world and shadowy buildings into a regular teenager's bedroom on a Sunday afternoon. Candace looked around, blinking.
"Are you okay?" Tamara asked. "How's your hand? Is it back?"
Candace looked down at it, slowly, and Tamara looked too. Her hand was still gone. But now it was healed. It looked as if it had been healed for a long time, actually.
Tamara slumped down on the bed. "Oh god, Candace, I'm so sorry," she said. "I should have been faster. I should have--"
"No," Candace said. "It's okay. She was turning the stump around, looking at it from all angles. "It really isn't so bad, I promise. And we got it in the end, didn't we?"
"Yeah," Tamara sighed. "Listen, you want to go back? It's probably been twenty minutes over there."
"Sounds good," Candace said. She gestured to the door with her arm. "Lead the way."
It hadn't been twenty minutes on the other side; something more like five. All the other Warriors, Sunlight and Moonlight, were gathered around the doorway. In addition to the girl with the spear, there was a girl with two holsters at her sides, holding what appeared to be old-fashioned guns, a girl with a dagger and mirror, like Candace, and finally a girl with no weapon at all. Standing next to them were Midori and Brittany, and the Dawn People they'd been traveling with, Yin and Obol and Mud.
"Well?" Brittany asked, as soon as they stepped through.
Candace held up her arm. "It doesn't look like I'm getting the hand back," she said. "But at least it's healed up now."
The girl with the guns bit her lip. "I'm really sorry," she said. "If I'd shot it just a few seconds earlier--"
"It wouldn't have made a difference," Tamara said. "It barely moved from your bullets. You could have been shooting it even while it was chomping down and it wouldn't have stopped."
The gun girl's lip curled. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "Did you actually see my bullets? I was punching holes clean through that thing, and taking out obia hearts at the same time. It noticed that. I definitely kept it from chomping on you. How about some gratitude?"
"Gratitude for what?" Tamara said. "I mean, laying down cover is fine and all, but who was in the middle actually destroying the thing? I don't think it was you."
"Listen, you--"
"Oh my God, stop fighting!" The weaponless girl stepped between the two of them, holding her hands up to each of them. "You know how much I hate..." She trailed off, her expression becoming confused.
Tamara was getting a shock of recognition in her stomach. Who could this be, but... "Lachante?"
The girl turned to her. "Tamara? You're-- you're a Warrior too?"
"And you and Crystal are?" Tamara turned to Brittany. "So... they're girls just like us too? The Moonlight Warriors?"
Brittany was frowning. "Wait, you mean this is Lachante? Your friend, goes to our school Lachante? But your family isn't-- or are they?"
"So it runs in your family too?" Lachante was starting to get excited. "I didn't know there was another family like ours!"
"Neither did I!" Brittany said. "It's weird to think how many generations we've been doing this... and I guess it was the two of us every time? Was your last time around 1980?"
"Yeah, it was my cousin," Lachante said.
"And it was my aunt," Brittany said. "Listen, after this, we've got to compare notes or something. All this time, we thought you guys were just... I don't know. Not that you were like us."
"Yeah, same here," Lachante said.
"Yeah."
Tamara was looking from one to the other. "So... you guys are the Moonlight Warriors, right?" she said. "Does that mean... does that mean you're trying to put the Dusk Queen on the throne?"
"Well, yeah," Lachante said. Then she gasped. "But that means you're--"
"For the Dawn Queen, yeah," Tamara said. "So... what now?"
Crystal grinned. "Now the best team wins, right?" Her hands started to hover in the vicinity of her pistols.
Lachante moved between them again. "No no no, no way! You two are not going to drag your stupid personality conflicts into this? We'll just... part ways after this. We'll each try for our own queen, but we don't have to fight each other. And whoever wins, wins. How does that sound?"
"Sounds good," Brittany said. "Then I guess we can just go opposite ways here--"
"No!" Tamara said, cutting her off. Everyone looked in her direction. "Don't treat this like a game! It's important. Our queen has to take the throne. Remember Arsal? Remember Onala? Do we really want these people in charge?"
Brittany looked to Tamara, and then back to Lachante. "Listen, you know how she is," she said. "We'll talk to her, okay?"
"Yeah," Lachante said. She pointed down the street. "We'll go this way and you go that way. Maybe we'll meet up at the palace!"
"Will do," Brittany said. She grabbed Tamara's arm before she could protest again. "Come on, let's go," she said, jogging in the direction that Lachante had pointed out.
As soon as they slowed down, Tamara let loose. "What was that?!" she shouted. "You spend weeks telling us that they're the worst people in creation, but suddenly we're all buddy-buddy? You were the one who said our first responsibility was to the Dawn People. Why are we acting like this isn't serious?"
Candace patted her on the shoulder. "Listen, Tamara," she said. "It's not that it's not important. But we've got to go back to our regular lives after this. Do you really want to destroy all your friendships over this? You have to think about the future too."
"And it's not like it's hopeless even if we do lose," Brittany said. "My aunt's team lost, twenty years ago, but here we are. No matter what we do, eventually there'll be another set of girls here trying to crown a new Dawn Queen. It's not like the Dawn People are going to get wiped out or anything."
Tamara set her jaw. "You're all making it about being comfortable, but it's not about that," she said. "It's about being right."
"Look, don't worry about it," Midori said, finally entering into the conversation. "I mean, we're going to win, right? You're acting like we're just going to hand the crown over to them. But we're not, you know? We're still going to crown our queen, the Dawn Queen. We're not less serious just because we aren't trying to kill them."
"Fine, then. Let's get to the palace." But Tamara clenched her fists as she spoke. She was feeling awfully angry at the rest of the Sunlight Warriors just then.
"Good," Brittany said, obviously considering the matter closed. "Mud, what's the best way from here?"
"This is good, actually," Mud said. "We can go most of the way from here in Dawn People territory. As long as we don't run into another one of those things, we should be just fine."
And in the end, they didn't run into one. They made their way over debris, crossed a few barricades (these manned by Dawn People, thankfully), and some unknown span of hours later, they reached the center of the city. Unlike the white everywhere else, the palace was set in the center of a huge field of grass.
"Beautiful," Midori breathed.
"Exposed, though," Tamara said.
Brittany shrugged. "There's not much we can do about it," she said. "We can ask some of the soldiers to come with us, but I'm not sure how much it would help."
She turned to Mud and Obol. "Thank you so much for your guidance to this place," she said. "You have done us inestimable service."
Obol bowed, and Mud nodded-- or did something that approximated a nod, anyway. "Thank you for your service to us, Warriors," Obol said.
"It was nothing," Mud whispered.
They turned and walked back into the city, Obol looking back once to wave. In a few moments, they vanished as if they'd never been there at all.
Brittany turned to Yin. "What about you?" she asked.