"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit."
- The Shadow
"*that entire Stolen Identity 3 skit from Mad TV*"
- Will Sasso
Xianghua was a girl beside herself. She wanted to bury her memories of this grimy, moldy, putrid place. This den of demon worship and forbidden experimentation. She remembered the mysterious assassin who crept into her bedroom in the palace barracks and put her to an early sleep with a blow to the head before she could defend herself. She remembered the faceless mumbling alchemists prying at her like a botanical specimen under a telescope as she lay in their cold lab chamber fading in and out of a poisoned-laced stupor. She remembered one of them winding up a chisel over her eyes after they had made their use of her. She remembered barely putting her senses together just long to escape the underground temple and claw her way on to the first boat back to China.
She never wanted to remember any of it, but the calling of the Light made her come back. It was drawing her like a magnet being attracted to its polar opposite. With the sacred Krita-Yuga in her hand and her fears pushed out of her mind, Xianghua traveled deeper into the unwelcoming pits of fate. She was a part of something hideously wrong in the world, and she had to set it right.
The dismal stone corridors winded and intersected, but the palpations in her heart told her which direction to follow. She passed countless headless gods, armless goddesses, and crumbling satyrs on her way, before finally arriving in the central chamber of paganism and sacrilege. The first things she found waiting for her were a rising sense of dread and a person dressed in black.
The woman was standing in front of an odd arrangement of giant stone wheels with a wooden lever in her reach. She could have been a hero in her own time, but now she was darkness incarnate. She was wrapped head to toe in a cloak. Strands of messy blonde hair with a stressful gray streak here and there dangled out of her hood. She was blind in one eye, the price to pay for being brought to the edge of existence and back. A raging Inferno burned in the other eye.
Underneath the layers of the cloak, there were glimpses of a laced blue tunic and a white skirt decorated with a Greek pattern. The fabric was torn and sprinkled with long-dried blood, remnants of the day Soul Edge had exploded in her hands and left a portion of his scorching metal fragments embedded in her chest. The shards had remained a constant part of her for the past three years, thriving off of her body while slowly rotting her to the core. In every way Xianghua was the emissary of Soul Calibur, this woman in a cloak must have been the twisted courtesan of Soul Edge.
"Ah. So the cute flower bud returns to compete with her fully blossomed sisters," the Grecian woman chuckled.
The walls of the primitive research room were lined with large glass vases. Each one was sealed under a round stone lid and filled with murky liquid solutions. Each one housed the same identical female outline floating in a weightless fetal position. Elegant lotus petals preserved in vats of fermenting purple oil.
"Do you appreciate my Bacchus Flasks?" the Grecian woman asked Xianghua with a sting of sarcasm. "They were made to keep you comfortable."
Gritting her teeth, struggling to stop herself from crushing Krita-Yuga's silver handle in her fist, Xianghua growled her short response.
"You swindler!"
The Grecian woman took the threat with nothing more than a simple shrug.
"Let's not delay the reunion any further, shall me?"
Her withered fingers with their twisted nails emerged from under her cloak and cranked the wooden lever sideways. The research chamber began to rumble like the Titans fighting atop Mount Olympus. The stone wheels behind the woman slowly turned in opposing directions on rope pulleys and scraped against each other, generating sparks that skipped across long bronze cables. The sparks traveled like bolts of lightning sent down from Zeus into the life-sustaining alchemy tanks.
One of the massive jars shattered to pieces after a few seconds of electrical conduction. Every Bacchus Flask in the room was soon exploding in a storm of crystal rain. Xianghua watched with her lips gasping and her eyes growing in alarm, while her hooded enemy remained ominously still.
The haze of purple ether gradually cleared away. Standing in place of the shattered vases were at least a dozen identical twins to Xianghua. Dripping with alchemical wine and wearing nothing but small gold bracelets and collars, they were crafted like the finest nymphs of the Mediterranean.
The cloaked woman cast a smile under her hood.
"Behold your superior self. These homunculi were born from you and sired from Soul Edge. Soul Calibur will have no use for a weak garden rat like you now that you can be replaced so easily. I give her the name Xianghua Apate."
"You'll have to kill me before I hand it over!" Xianghua shouted in rebellion. She had to keep her eyes away from her doppelgangers so she wouldn't start feeling naked herself.
"The flower bud tries to grow thorns even after all of her soil goes sour. How precious," the Grecian woman said with a smirk. Then her voice became deathly chilling.
"Do as she asks, slaves."
A horrifying change swept over the Xianghua impersonators. Their hair became like leather, their flesh turned to scales, and they each grew a foot and a half taller. Their faces lost part of their soft human quality and gained a sharper demonic complexion. Their bare physiques shifted and altered until they were only vaguely feminine. The jewelry on their wrists and necks was the only way to tell they weren't wild monsters. Before, Xianghua had to turn her eyes away to keep herself from feeling embarrassed. Now she had to turn her eyes away just to keep herself from feeling squeamish with her own skin.
The homunculi revealed their matured forms as Gorgon beasts, crossbreeding Xianghua's natural beauty with raw reptilian ferociousness. The flower garden had been turned into a snake nest, and each of them was more powerful bare-handed than Xianghua herself with the Krita-Yuga.
They closed around their maternal sister in a semi-circle. Xianghua held the Krita-Yuga in a cautious battle stance, while the scheming woman in the cloak watched on from the dark.
The Gorgons roared to show their fangs and charged at Xianghua in a mob. Xianghua pounced off of her heels and plunged her sword toward the closest twin.
Author's note: Totally not Diablo II.