Night 55: Stairwell by Waiting Room/Lobby 1

[yin_yang_fox]

[from here]No sound came from inside the stairwell, but that amounted to little at times. Still the Digimon stretched her senses, moving quickly and quietly into the dark. None were in this place yet, despite the small crowd in the hall below. It might mean none have moved upstairs, or it might simply mean they were quicker than she

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[fangirlfatale]

[from here]

No light in here. Morgan hugged the wall and paused to listen and let her eyes adjust the rest of the way before moving on. There were footsteps coming from the stairs above her: a thin blonde woman in a black coat. Morgan tensed for a second until she determined it wasn't the soldiers' uniform, and then she relaxed. Probably not a threat.

She started climbing, keeping her sword arm free. The bottom of a staircase was a dangerous position from a tactical standpoint, and the lousy lighting just made it worse--all the more when your targets had serious firearms. She wasn't too worried, though. Whatever rumors might be floating around, she hadn't seen anything much at night besides shadows and a bunch of paranoid prisoners.

[damned_monsters]

There had been no sound to start, but that changed soon enough. It started with a faint scritch-scratching at the top of the stairs. Then louder clicking, scurrying back and forth. Something - or rather several somethings - had smelled the arrival of fresh scents in the rising corridor. The excitement was palpable, with the clicking growing ever more frantic.

And then, the rats poured down the stairs.

There were five of them, running as a group tonight. Alone, a single rat was basically nothing. Together? A bit more of a force to be reckoned with. Each one was a whole foot in length and armed with wickedly curved claws and diseased mouths - all aiming for the succulent flesh of new prey.

[fangirlfatale]

Morgan froze again as soon as she heard the scratching noise. That wasn't a patient. It sounded like--

A second later it turned out to be exactly what it sounded like. "Rats!" Morgan hissed, readying her sword as the giant (seriously, seventeenth-century rats were big enough, but what were they feeding these things?) vermin hurtled towards her. She pressed close to the wall again to keep herself from getting either knocked over or surrounded by the creatures and slashed sharply at the first one in the pack. The move was aimed to decapitate, but expert swordswoman though she might be, she was still aiming at a rapidly-moving target in the dark. She didn't even wait to process whether the blow had connected before she edged up a step, going for the high ground.

[yin_yang_fox]

The Digimon heard the faint sounds moments before the squeaking bodies drove themselves forward. Her mind shifted instantly. There was another below her, but fighting on the stairs themselves was nothing close to an option. Below or above? She narrowed her eyes, then jumped forward, agility bringing her down lightly a few steps higher. With luck, all would pass underneath, but the Digimon was prepared for some leaping up as well.

From a breast pocket, she retrieved two scalpels, flinging them at the rat closest to her. The blades were nothing like her diamond shards, but with any luck, they would wound these creatures as easily.

[damned_monsters]

The sword strike hit true, not decapitating the rat as intended, but still slicing the thing nearly in two, leaving it spasming on the step in a pool of its own blood as the life swiftly drained from its body.

That had been only one rat, however, and a shift up the stairs was not going to deter the rest of the pack so easily. Momentum carried two of the rats past Morgan, and by the time they were able to stop, they were several steps below both her and Renamon. One was caught by the scalpels; the wounds weren't fatal, at least not yet, but it was stopped in its tracks for the moment. One more in the back of the pack, however, was able to react quickly enough to Morgan's shift in position. It leapt off the stairs as she ran, teeth and claws bared as he aimed to latch onto her thigh.

The other two had some trouble getting turned back around, but were big enough that climbing back up the stairs again was not a problem. They rushed back at their prey, not caring at all for their fallen brothers.

[fangirlfatale]

Morgan made it up and twisted back to see the first rat go down. "Hah!" she crowed, right before another one dug its claws and jaws into her thigh and her triumph turned into a grunt of pain. Not good. She didn't want to take the time to maneuver the blade at the right angle; instead, Morgan drove the elbow of her sword arm hard into the top of the rat's spine, trying to dislodge it. She could worry about damaging it once she'd gotten it off of her

[yin_yang_fox]

The other was competent, so it seemed. One rush of feet silenced, the body's momentum rolling it in a soft series of thuds down the stairs. One down, then. The others wheeled around as the other woman took up a position nearby. She began to engage, and Renamon's hand felt at the small of her back, tugging one of the shear blades from her belt. Using the bladed knuckle as a guard, she waited for the sound of approach, and then drove the blade downward, hoping if nothing less, to pin it to the ground.

The sound echoing in the stairwell was only a hindrance. It wasn't possible for the Digimon to accurately gauge how many creatures there were. From the sound, it could be four to seven, and she would only know for certain when they stopped their attack through death or retreat. It had been a while, she thought. Since she had faced creatures like this.

[damned_monsters]

The rat on Morgan's thigh gave a shrill, damnable shriek when the elbow slammed into its spine. Frail bones were cracked immediately upon impact, causing the creature's grip to loosen. The only things keeping it on her for the moment were the dripping, plague-ridden teeth sunken into her flesh, holding the rat where it was like hooks in a wall. While its claws weren't strong enough to grip as hard anymore, the thing still tried to bite down harder through its pain. It wasn't quite dead yet, and it was going to enjoy all the blood it could get before it passed

[fangirlfatale]

She'd kept the two charging rats at bay for now. So first order of business: kill that mangy blood-sucking plague-infested clump of fur! Morgan had felt a few satisfying cracks underneath her elbow, but the teeth still digging into her thigh hurt like heck. Blood was running down her leg, too.

Now that the other rats weren't an immediate threat, she could spend a couple of precious seconds lining up a precision swipe: bringing her blade close to her face, Morgan swung it down across her body in a sharp diagonal line. If she'd done it right, it should be enough to slice right through the body of the rat attached to her, cleaving it just about in half from one side to the other.

She hoped the one at her feet would still be there when she'd dealt with this one, but probably no such luck. Too bad. It'd be fun to punt that disgusting rodent down the stairs like a dried-out skull.

[yin_yang_fox]

The blade drove itself in with a low wet sound accompanied by an animal shriek of pain. The Digimon's emotions shifted within her, even as she twisted the blade to keep it still. Again, again, and here she was again, questioning if these creatures were only doing the only thing that they could. The rat beneath her reached upward at her, nails catching on the skin around her wrist in furrows. She narrowed her eyes in a wince, and without wasting time, drove the three blades of the knuckle into the creature's spine.

The probability of success was high, but there were still more to consider. She belatedly heard the quick patter of feet before thick teeth and claws tore into an ankle. She moved on reaction without thinking--pulling her leg upward, and then quickly against the wall nearby to crush the creature into it.

[damned_monsters]

Half a rat went flying off Morgan's leg, he precision paying off. The teeth finally dislodged, and the clumps of monster meat went spattering onto the steps below. Guts and rat blood would squelch underfoot now if she stepped in the wrong places. The other rat, meanwhile, was now managing to claw its way onto Morgan's boot now that it had been left along long enough to recover a bit. It was still sluggish from the blood loss, but if it wasn't stopped soon enough, it would get high enough to bite her calf.

The rat under Renamon's blades finally expired then, claws slumping to the ground as the thing gave one last shrill breath. The other rat, however, did get a nice juicy chunk of ankle before it was crushed. Even vermin like these got their last wishes sometimes, it seemed.

[fangirlfatale]

Another one down. Morgan didn't get a chance to celebrate before she felt a new weight on her foot. The rat down there was clawing its way up past the wide cuff and ruining the leather while it was at it.

"You fight like a cow!" she taunted as she drove the blade down alongside of her leg, attempting to skewer the rat like a shish kabob. Then she wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, I see why insult swordfighting went out of style." Seriously, whoever had first confused the ability to memorize like fifteen lines of rhyming repartee with wit had probably had a pretty short swordfighting career.

But that wasn't the important thing right now. "Is that all of them?" she demanded of the other fighter.

[yin_yang_fox]

The small body crumpled against the wall, sliding down as Renamon straightened her form. Her leg was bleeding from the gouge under her calf, and she frowned in thought, eyes flicking over the darkened stairwell. Here was not a place to see to it. Somewhere that she could defend against easier. Her ears strained, and finally picked up nothing more than the far off sounds of others, and the woman below. That was all.

She flicked the blade she had been using and returned it to the back of her belt. The claws got a perfunctorily wipe against her pants, then she touched her fingers to her wounded wrist, determining the damage. Manageable. Nothing severe. The woman called upward, and Renamon's attention diverted to the other, raising a brow. "For now, yes," she answered matter-of-factually. There were no other creatures in the stairwell at the moment.

[fangirlfatale]

"Good." Morgan bent down and lightly scraped one side of her sword against a step, sliding the skewered rat off like a cherry tomato. She wiped both sides of the blade quickly against the least bloody patch of rat fur she could find. Next she checked the wound on her leg. It was still leaking blood. The clawed-up pants were already a lost cause, so she ripped some fabric off from a tear at the bottom of her thigh and knotted the strip around the wound. It wasn't great, but it'd be good enough to move.

That done, she turned to the woman a few steps up. Not that she'd needed the help, obviously, but she could appreciate that someone else had been around to lower the amount of time she had to waste on those...things. "Nice work," Morgan said as she climbed ahead to narrow the gap between them, determinedly ignoring the pain in her leg. "I'm Morgan LeFlay, Mighty Pirate Hunter™. And you are?"

[yin_yang_fox]

The woman was... boisterous, to say it in one way, and the Digimon was reminded of a certain boy she had met. She pressed that from her mind to focus on the woman before her. One with a title, it seemed, albeit strange. "Renamon," she replied perfunctorily. She eyed the blade at the other's side. It was the most she'd seen another fight in a while now.

"You've been here awhile, I'm taking," she added, half-dryly. Actual weapons were not common, but she seemed at ease with using it. Though if Morgan was... a pirate hunter, as she said, Renamon supposed knowing the intricacies of swordplay would be necessary in the field.

[fangirlfatale]

That question made her stop to consider--she'd never actually done the math. "A week today," she answered after a few seconds, and then added, half under her breath, "God, how embarrassing." An entire week, and she had nothing to show for it except a sword and her clothes, which she hadn't even earned. On a regular week she'd have collected half a dozen bounties and still had time to work out.

"How long have you been here?" she asked. If it was even longer, that wasn't too impressive, but the woman might still have learned something she could use. Like what was worth looking at on the second floor. If she was honest, Morgan was kind of taking a stab in the dark heading upstairs.