The Puppet Master was fast as hell for his age.
Not fast enough for Tigress to lose him, though. He leaped through the bamboo, unable to get high enough and out of her reach, but he always was just one step ahead. She was speeding after him on all fours, feeling her blood boil with the thrill of the chase. He didn't look back, didn't give any indication of fear at her being so close he could probably feel her breath at his feet. Tigress was convinced that this was the real Sârmă; no hands, no matter how skilled, could make a puppet move like this. Especially not when they were running away.
Though the darkness was absolute, she had no trouble keeping the Puppet Master in her sights. His distinctive silhouette was outlined against the leering moon, its silver glow making both of their shadows merge together. In this moment, nothing existed in her mind except for her quarry. She knew, without a doubt, that those three people Sârmă had murdered would be avenged this night. So Tigress pushed herself, straining her muscles to run faster, the sound of her own blood pulsing in her ears.
Sârmă was tricky; he would change directions and run off through the pathless forest, in a vain attempt to confuse her. But it never did, even when he ran through the aphotic shadows, being engorged by the darkness, she never gave up her chase. He must have been getting tired by now; after that long show he had played tonight, taking down the stage, and fighting them had surely taken its toll on his energy. Tigress caught on to this when he would occasionally slip on whatever bamboo stalk he was holding on to, his grip failing in evident exhaustion. No point in wasting all of my energy, too, she thought, slowing down her pace but keeping the Puppet Master in her vision. When he couldn't flee anymore, that was when she would attack
He's definitely exhausted, Tigress thought, smirking as she ran. She couldn't hear anything over the blood pounding in her ears, but if she could, Sârmă's panting would have replaced it. His long black nobleman's coat was whirring as he leaped away, but it couldn't hide his age. His frailty. It was all starting to crash down on him now, that was fairly obvious, even in her feral state of mind.
Then the Puppet Master made his mistake. His grip failed him, and he flew off and hit a bamboo stalk with such force that it snapped the strong plant in half. "Got you!" Tigress shouted, pouncing on the supine Sârmă. He was laying there motionless, and he didn't even flinch when she landed on him and raised a paw, claws unsheathed. His eyes stared up into her own, those cold, black eyes, and then his mouth fell open woodenly.
Dammit, Tigress thought, rage beginning to boil in her heart. It was just a puppet. She stood up with a growl, her eyes narrowed in fury. He had outsmarted her, and because of that, he was still out there in the woods, probably laughing at how foolishly she had fallen for his trick. Wait, no... the other Sârmă had ran off in a different direction, and Po had gone after him so that they would get the real one no matter what. Now the panda was lost and alone in the dark... with the Puppet Master.
"Po!" Tigress gasped, the feral rage that had overtaken her rational thought quickly replaced with fear for her friend. That madman hadn't been running; he had deliberately separated them so he could finish them off one at a time. If anything happened to the panda because of her recklessness, she would never be able to forgive herself. She quickly turned around and ran as though all of the demons in the underworld were nipping at her heels, into the direction she thought she had come from.
...
I would have definitely caught this guy by now if he couldn't climb, thought Po as he struggled over a large boulder after the Puppet Master. He was just ahead of the panda, unable to outrun him, Po unable to catch up to him. Sârmă took a strange, lurching route through the forest, often going off the path and into the darkness and reappearing as he dashed through patches of moonlight. Damn, my night vision isn't as good as Tigress's...
But Po didn't hesitate to go after him, even when he couldn't see his own hands in front of his face. He didn't want to feel the pain of Tigress's blows if he let the murderer get away. The crashing ahead of him told him that the Puppet Master was having the same difficulty navigating through the dark as the giant panda was. "Ha!" Po shouted at a rustle to the left of him in the infinite darkness, throwing a punch. A stalk of bamboo crashed lifelessly to the ground. A silhouette revealed itself in the moonlight, clad in black and wearing a top hat.
"There you are!" Po ran to him, but the Puppet Master stepped back and vanished into the darkness again. He's not running anymore, Po thought, and a chill ran down his spine. Oh no, I think this might be the real one.
Po stopped, gasping for breath. Sârmă was nowhere to be seen, and as he strained his eyes to catch even the slightest glimpse of him, the Puppet Master appeared again in another patch of moonlight, even farther away. "Aha!" Po in the direction his adversary was standing in, but was tripped up by something and fell hard on his face. Ignoring the stinging pain in his nose, he got up and ran after Sârmă again. The white-faced saki monkey leaped off to the side, and Po heard rapid footsteps as he ran away again. He must have found another path.
It didn't take long for Po to catch up to the Puppet Master; he was old, and probably tired, so his running speed had drastically slowed, and he wasn't leaping through the bamboo anymore. I've got him! I've got him! He thought excitedly as he closed the distance between himself and Sârmă. Man, Tigress is gonna be so impressed I managed to catch him!
Po tackled the Puppet Master to the ground, feeling the soft silk of his clothes as he grabbed him and forced him to the dirt. "Yes! Finally!" Po shouted out to the night. "I finally got you!" As soon as he finished yelling, he realized that something was wrong. The old man beneath him wasn't moving at all, and his limbs were spread in all different directions, broken and twisted.
"Aw, c'mon!" Po whined, turning the Puppet Master over. He had been wrong before; it wasn't the real Sârmă at all, just one of his puppets. "Man, this guy is good." Po thought aloud, then noticed something weird. To his left was a massive pile of smashed wood, once high quality, now just a mound of useless splinters. He caught a glimpse of velvet hanging out halfway up the pile, and he realized what it was. "Hey, look, it's the Puppet Master's stage! I guess we finally found out what happened to it, didn't we, Tigress?" Po looked around, and then realized his mistake. "Oh yeah, Tigress isn't here. She's off chasing the..." His eyes widened. "Tigress!"
He was about to turn around when he saw something move when the wind blew, high above. When Po turned his emerald gaze upward, he saw dozens- no, hundreds of figures suspended from the bamboo stalks on wires. Oh no, puppets! Was Po's horrified thought as he got into a fighting stance, ready to fight them off. When they didn't move at all, he frowned and stepped closer, trying to get a better view. The darkness didn't help very much, but he didn't need to make out their features to know what they really were.
Corpses.
Po took a step back, feeling his breathing grow shallow and fast. There were hundreds of corpses hanging from the wires by their necks, like Sârmă's grisly puppets. He spun around, but it was the same view in every direction. He didn't notice the hanging bodies before; he'd been too focused on the chase. Now, the cool night air was filled with the reek of blood and bowels released in death. Po wanted to throw up, but he swallowed back the bile. I can't puke, Kung Fu masters don't puke when they see a few bodies.
"Tigress?" he tentatively called out, hoping she was close by, then shut himself up, realizing how stupid that was. There could be something even worse than the psychopathic Puppet Master roaming the night. Something with claws and fangs and tentacles and... no. Things like that don't really exist. I need to find Tigress before Sârmă kills her. I don't even want to think about what he'll do to her before he does that...
I don't even know where she is, thought Po right before he ran off into the woods, but he didn't care. He would fight a million puppets if he had to to save Tigress. Nothing was going to stop him from finding her. The dark welcomed him as it had with the dead who were hanging above with a chilling embrace, but this time there was little fear in his heart at the terrors the night beheld. It was filled with determination and sick, sick worry.
...
Tigress had never run so fast in her entire life. Her lungs burned, her claws tore on the ground, but she didn't care about the pain, even as she began to leave bloody prints wherever she ran. Po was in terrible danger, if he was even still alive. An image came to her mind of Po's body mutilated and left in the alley like trash, and the thought filled her with more fear than anything she had felt before. I have to find him, she thought as she dodged between bamboo, trees, rocks and bushes.
She had no idea where Po was, or even where she was, and her night vision was useless in the pitch black. Why did I have to go after the Puppet Master alone? I should have made Po come with me, even if it meant letting that lunatic escape. No friend's life is worth sacrificing to take down one enemy. Tigress leaped over a deep ditch that suddenly appeared in front of her and hit the ground running, ignoring the agony that burned her paws whenever they touched the dirt.
The Puppet Master would suffer unimaginably if he did anything to Po. Tigress's claws unsheathed as she imagined sinking them into that expressionless face. Kung Fu had no place in the fate that awaited Sârmă if she found the panda dead. Those thoughts only distracted her; it was like she was assuming Po had already met his end, so she silenced them with a growl. It was much, much harder than it used to be to quell such treacherous thoughts.
Suddenly, a massive figure stepped out from a deep patch of shadows and directly into her path. Startled, Tigress didn't have any time to stop, and she collided with the person head-on. Both of them went flying, rolling a decent fifteen feet before coming to a stop against a boulder. She was laying on top of whoever she had crashed into, and could feel the warmth radiating from his fur. She couldn't see him, but she knew exactly who it was she'd bowled over."Po," Tigress breathed a sigh of relief
"Tigress?" Po looked confused for a moment, and then his face broke into a grin. "It is you!"
"You defeated the Puppet Master?" They both asked at the same time. Po's eyes widened.
"I caught his puppet! I thought you had the real one."
"So did I, at first." Tigress admitted "But I knocked him down, and discovered that it wasn't the real one. I thought he'd deliberately separated us so he would only fight one at a time, but now I have no idea what he's playing at."
"Yeah, he's really weird and all," Po said "but could you get off of me please? I'm kind of laying on something sharp."
Tigress realized that she was still on top of the panda, and scurried back quickly, allowing him to get up. She hoped the darkness was enough to hide her blushing. "That's better," Po said. Then a grim look settled in his eyes. "Oh, and I found his stage. The Puppet Master's, I mean. He'd broken it to pieces, so I guess that explains how he was able to hide it so quickly."
"Was there anything else there?" she inquired.
Po was silent for a moment, so long that Tigress thought he wasn't going to respond at all. Though she could only faintly see the emerald green of his eyes, she could definitely make out the haunted look in them.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "There were bodies, hanging from the bamboo. It looked like there were hundreds of them, not just a few. They definitely weren't puppets."
"My god," Tigress breathed, sitting back against a gnarled tree. "I think we may have discovered what happened to those villages."
Po nodded, or at least that's what the motion looked like in the black. "He led me there so that I could see them. I think he wants us to be hanging up there with them."
"I don't know," she said. "He said he wanted us for his 'glorious kingdom', but it's hard to interpret the words and actions of a madman. Nothing he's done tonight makes any sense. Why would he separate us, lead you to those bodies, and then let us find our way back to each other when he could have killed us alone?"
"Well..." Po began with more than a little uncertainty. "I think I might have an answer for that, but it's really just another question."
"What is it?"
"Do you know where the hell we are?"
Tigress stood up. "Of course I-" she stopped and looked around. She should know where she was; they weren't very far from the Valley of Peace, but the darkness gave everything an alien, unfamiliar look. The Puppet Master had managed to get them lost in their own domain. "-dammit."
"Yeah, and it doesn't help that Sârmă's out there still, probably watching us right now. But I don't think he's trying to kill us yet. It looks like he's been luring us somewhere this whole time. But where?" Po ended his sentence with a question, looking to Tigress's noctilucent eyes for answers. She could provide none.
"He'll come for us again," Tigress promised "but I imagine he'll let us think we beat him again, and then run. Wherever he wants us to be, we must be close to it now."
"I guess that's not where we want to be."
"Very astute, Po." Tigress said. She paused for a moment. "If he comes for us again, we won't stand a chance in the dark. We need to find somewhere with more light, and fast."
"As fast as lightning." He agreed, standing up with her. "But... wait. Wouldn't that just make it easier for him to see us, too?"
"It's the only chance we have. Come on, let's go."
They eventually found a clearing in the seemingly endless forest, which they were able to rest for a moment to regain their bearings. Fortunately, the moonlight here was so bright that it could cast shadows, so they wouldn't have any trouble fighting as long as they didn't leave the clearing. When the moonlight touched Tigress's fur, it turned it silver and black. And red. Tigress felt a stinging pain when she saw the crimson liquid soaking her paws.
"Whoa, Tigress, you're bleeding!" Po exclaimed, his eyes widened with concern. Her claws had been torn or ground down and were seeping blood, a lot of it. She'd completely forgotten that they had been damaged when she was running through the woods in her desperation to find Po. She must have had her claws unsheathed the entire time and not noticed, and she'd been running across hard stone for a good portion of the chase. As the memory came crashing back, the agony struck with a burning vengeance. She didn't let any of it show on her face, though, even when Po grabbed her paws to examine them closely.
"How'd you even manage to do this?" he worriedly asked. "Did you, like, run across iron with your claws unsheathed, or something? This looks pretty bad."
Tigress jerked her paws out of his grasp and let them hang by her sides. "I think I'll live." she said. "Assuming the Puppet Master doesn't kill us, that is."
"That's... comforting," Po said, looking down at the ground. He gasped. "Tigress, your feet are bleeding too!"
"Yes, they also have claws on them. Po, we have bigger things to worry about now than torn nails. Remember the Puppet Master? He has an extra advantage over us now. I won't be able to cut his puppet's strings until my claws grow back, which will probably be in a few weeks."
"But he could attack us at any minute!"
"And attack I will." Came Sârmă's response from the woods around them. This time, they weren't as startled as when he first appeared out of nowhere. They got into their battle stances right away, back to back.
"You two certainly live up to your reputation," the Puppet Master said. He came shambling out of the darkness, clutching the right side of his chest. When he lowered his hand, Tigress felt a chill run down her spine. A splintered stalk of bamboo protruded from the right side of his chest, gleaming black with blood. Suddenly her torn claws hurt a little bit less.
"You have damaged me." Sârmă said softly, but there wasn't even the slightest hint of pain on his expressionless face. "I will have to punish you, my sweet, sweet servants. I may even transfer the wounds I will make on your flesh to your new, eternal bodies. Wouldn't that be lovely? Truly, you will be the gems of my glorious kingdom."
"How the hell is he even standing?" Tigress heard Po whisper.
The Puppet Master grabbed the end of the bamboo stalk and pulled it out slowly from his chest, his expression not flickering at all. When it had exited his body, he dropped it and it slowly rolled away, leaving a thick trail of blood behind it. Sârmă reached into his coat and pulled out a vial that looked like it was carved from bone and popped off the cork. He splashed the clear liquid contents onto his wound and to their amazement, it healed, rapidly closing in on itself and eventually vanishing.
"You see, I am far more than the king of my puppets, now." Sârmă whispered. "I have become the god of my glorious kingdom. Bow down before me, or face my divine wrath."
"Never!" Po and Tigress responded at the same time. A smile slowly crept along the Puppet Master's face.
"Such beautiful spirits you possess. I am honoured to take them from you."
"What are you after? Why have you come to the Valley of Peace?" Tigress asked the saki monkey. A humourless chuckle answered her.
"Just stay. I want you to stay." His eyes got even darker and the smile slipped from his face. "I'm going to cut open your brains and make you stay with me."
Sârmă ducked quickly, just as dozens of large shapes flew out of the darkness behind him. Puppets, and not smaller ones like the goat and pigs he'd attacked them with earlier. There were wolves, crocodiles, rhinos, even a massive elephant puppet. How he could control so many was beyond Tigress, but control them he did. She had to duck as a tidal wave of puppets flew towards her and Po, and then charge the Puppet Master while his puppets came back after them. He kept his elephant standing to the left of him with a broadsword in hand, ready to defend himself if they got too close.
Before they could even get within twenty feet of him, the elephant puppet stomped the ground, creating a tremendous shockwave that shook the ground and almost knocked them off their feet. Then it flew through the air much faster than a real elephant possibly could and began rapidly swinging the gargantuan broadsword in deadly, wild swings. The rest of the puppets descended upon them with even greater speed.
How is he controlling them now? Wondered Tigress. I can't see any wires above, but he's using his wires to make them fight us.
She dashed between the legs of the elephant puppet a second before it cut her in two with its broadsword, and to her dismay, discovered another row of puppets on the other side, between her and Sârmă. They all carried spears, which they thrust in her direction in perfect synchronicity. Tigress batted the three closest weapons away and executed a perfect leap over their wooden forms. The Puppet Master was right beneath her now as she soared down to strike him, her fist extended before her.
There was a flash of movement in front of Sârmă, and one of his spear-wielding puppets appeared in front of him, brandishing the point upwards. Tigress couldn't stop herself from falling, so she had no choice but to curl into a ball in midair. The puppet's spear, which would have pierced her through the heart and killed her instantly, plunged into the area just below her shoulder, the iron head burying itself in her flesh and out her back. She gasped in pain and shock, right before another puppet came up and kicked her off of the spear, sending her flying back through the air in a spray of blood.
Tigress hit the ground hard, the wind rushing out from her lungs. "Tigress!" Po shouted, coming up and crouching beside her. A darker stain than the red vest she was wearing was rapidly spreading from her terrible wound. "Tigress, please, hang on for me, please."
"Po... behind you." Was all she was able to get out. Po looked over his shoulder to see a wall of puppets coming at him. He tried to duck under them but was too slow. Far too slow. They knocked him off his feet and he landed ten feet away from her. The puppets converged on him again, their weapons extended to impale him with a thousand blades.
"Po..." Tigress struggled to stand up. Though it took longer than it should have, she was able to get on her feet again. Blood loss and pain was making her limbs unsteady, blurring her vision, weakening her. She ran as fast as she could and grabbed his paw, dragging him out of the path of Sârmă's puppets a second before they landed where he had been.
"Tigress, you have to run away." Po said. "Find Master Shifu and tell him what happened here. He has to know."
"I'm not leaving you." Tigress snarled, dragging him to his feet, almost stumbling from his weight.
"Just go, Tigress! Or else Shifu will never know what happened to us! It's better to lose one than both."
Tigress knew she had no other choice, but she would be damned if she fled while her friend stayed and died. Po let go of her paw and shoved her away with force. Emerald and amber locked together, Tigress's eyes burning with rage, Po's with pleading. "Run, Tigress." He said, as the puppets came rushing towards him again. "I love you."
The puppets converged on him all at once and buried him under their masses.
Then she was running back through the bamboo, not knowing where she was going, and not caring. Her blood was draining fast, and in her half-delirious state of blood loss she saw puppets gazing at her behind every tree, every rock, their mocking eyes berating her for leaving Po behind. Eventually she burst out of the woods, onto a road. Clutching her shoulder wound tightly, feeling more of her lifeblood seep out of it, unable to go on any further. Gasping for breath, she fell to her knees, trying to fight the black that was closing around her vision. Po's emerald eyes were the last thing she thought of before she plunged into the void of unconsciousness.
...
Po struggled to breathe under the wooden army that was piled on top of him. He didn't think that any of their weapons had pierced him, but he was unsure. The puppets had hit him so hard that he was pretty sure he had been killed on impact. He just hoped Tigress got away, he didn't care about anything else right now. But wait... if he was dead, then whose voice was that, guttural and growling, sounding above the rising white noise in his ears? It definitely wasn't the Puppet Master.
"How predictable... I expected so much more from the Dragon Warrior."
Then Po passed out.
