Chapter 2 - Blood and Rose Petals
"Well Ismail, it's clear you are facing a minor set back here. How will you solve this?"
The man called Ismail was talking to himself, his voice barely audible and accompanied by shortness of breath. The reason for this became clear upon observing the gushing stab wound on the right side of his abdomen, staining with blood his uniform, his family garmet and the broken flak armor he wore underneath it. He was using one of his hands to pressure the wound, attempting to stop the bleeding, while the other was holding a Locke-Pattern Lascarbine, pointing it at the monster that was standing in front of him.
Before he could pull the trigger, however, the creature disarmed him with a backhand and with its truck-like muscular leg, he pinned the soldier to the ground, causing him to cry out in pain. That amused the monster immensely, as a throaty laughter erupted from its mouth, followed soon by a similar one from its comrade nearby.
The two creatures were part of the green-skinned xenos race known as the Orks. They lacked any form of gear and garb, barring a crude loincloth and some spikes of bone and stone piercing their ears and squat nose, and were armed only with crude metal blades and spears. They presented an intimidating frame, but what unnerved Ismail more was the third figure slowly approaching.
It was several feet bigger than the two feral orks, and size wasn't its only distinctive feature. Plates of armor were bolted in its shoulders, chest and thighs, and he was carrying a two-barrel Kostum Shoota in his right hand.
It was a Nob, and the implication that his presence on this planet pertained were terrifying.
He needed to alert the general and the rest of the regiment of what he saw in his scouting mission in the Iraxi mountains.
Trooper Arian had sacrificed himself by acting as a diversion when the two were discovered. Thanks to that, he was able to avoid detection up to this point, before he had been ambushed by this hunting party. Unsurprisingly, for all their dumb savagery, the orks knew these lifeless hills and valleys better than he did.
The Nob barked some orders in the vile alien tongue of the greenskins, and his two primitive subordinate seem to respond, as they grabbed him by his arms, each taking one of them, and raised him, until he found himself hanging in a cruciform position, as the Nob menacingly started to approach him.
It was then that Ismail noticed that the creature was carrying another weapon in his left hand.
It was a scythe, colored red like blood and black like a night without stars. Ismail was no artisan of any kind, but it was clear looking at its lines and form that the weapon was elegant yet functional, proof of its builder's craftsmanship.
It was a deadly, beautiful weapon. And there was no way an Ork could have built something that aesthetically pleasing.
Its wielder seemed to agree with that opinion, judging by the gleeful way he looked at it when trying some air slashes. Even the two feral orks looked euphoric while watching their leader with it, despite envy was equally present in their gaze.
When the Nob was just a dozen feet away from him, he began to raise the scythe over its head, and his intention became painfully obvious.
He wanted to wriggle out the orks' grasp and keep fighting, but their grip was too strong and the wound he had sustained was rapidly draining all the energy he had left. The only action he was able to achieve was to look at its executioner with a hateful stare and spat some last, defiant, words.
"Damn...you...xenos...scum".
The grin the creature was sporting at its words hurt the man almost as much as what was soon going to happen.
The blade descended, and Ismail saw red.
⁓
Always looking around in case Grimm tried to ambush her, Ruby quickly approached the edge of the canyon from where the noises came and took cover behind a small boulder. While she wanted to save whoever was in trouble, rushing recklessly into an unknown situation, especially without Crescent Rose, would not help anyone except the enemy.
She first needed to understand what she was dealing with.
The girl glanced down, and saw a man – a soldier, judging from the uniform, though she had no idea what Kingdom he was part of – with a wound in his abdomen, pointing a gun – a design that, while not looking costum-made, she never saw before, despite having read "The Great Book of Guns" several times and knowing it by heart – against his attackers. And it was the sight of them that made the Huntress widen her eyes in shock.
The creatures' skin had a sickly green tint. Huge, vicious tusks sprouted from their jaws. Oversized ears jutted from their misshapen heads and their eyes, recessed beneath a prominent brow, blazed with barbaric and malicious fury.
"What... are they?" she said to herself with a whisper.
They were not Grimm, that was pretty obvious. Honestly, the first thing that came to mind when she looked at them was the green monster that ate children present in one of the fairy tales her mother and Yang used to read her.
The cry of pain coming from the man as he was pinned on the ground snapped Ruby out of her stupor. What they were exactly became a secondary concern; the first impression was enough to lump them together with the Grimm in the same category of "ferocious and bloodthirsty beasts that seeks only destruction".
They looked smarter than the Grimm, however, considering how they were carrying weapons. The ones belonging to the two near the wounded soldier were primitive blades and spears, but the bigger one – which she assumed was the "Alpha" of the group – was carrying a gun (one looking so rudimentary and ill-crafted that she wouldn't be surprised if it exploded the moment it pulled the trigger) and a...
The girl's train of thought stopped completely at the sight of the other weapon...
... Crescent Rose.
... That beast was wielding Crescent Rose!
Just as the creature was about to slash the wounded man, she burst into rose petals.
⁓
Ismail saw red.
But it wasn't his own blood, like he imagined.
It came from the petals of some red flower, part of a crimson vortex that suddenly had engulfed the Ork Nob that was going to kill him.
The wind it generated was powerful enough to lift the heavy Ork in the air like it was a feather.
The greenskin, in a mix of confusion and panic, began to flail and thrash, an almost comical attempt to hit the whirlwind and bring itself back on the ground. During one of this uncoordinated movements, it lost the grip on the scythe.
In that moment, Ismail saw the shape of a person coalescing from the petals, grapping the scythe and then, as the vortex started to dissipate, putting its feet on the Nob's face and kick-pushing it away.
A combination of that push and gravity reclaiming its influence after that brief event, hurled the Ork on the ground from its mid-air state, crashing with a loud thump some thirty feet behind its previous position.
The human shape, on the other hand, made a three point landing in front of the guardman and the two xenos, and, following that, began to rise.
Ismail, despite his vision beginning to blur, could now make out clearly this mysterious entity.
She was a fairy-skinned young girl, not older than the youngest recruits of his regiment, with red-tipped black hair. She was wearing a black red corset over a white blouse, together with a crimson skirt and a similarly colored cape. The scythe previously owned by the fallen Nob was in her hands, and Ismail could not help but acknowledge how the two were made for each other, the weapon a natural extension of its newfound wielder.
The girl was murmuring something and he couldn't make out what she was saying, barring few disjoined words and phrases like "sorry", "Crescent" and "clean the stains of grease".
Both he and the orks were dumbstruck and hadn't move an inch since all this happened, but then the one grabbing his right arm seemed to snap out of its stupor and, with a snarl, had wretched the guardsman out of its companion's grip and was ready to slash the man's neck with a knife.
That action seemed to get the girl's attention.
Suddenly, Ismail dropped on the ground, groaning in pain as the wound flared up. He attempted to look at his arm and saw the ork's upper limb still locked on it, but disembodied from the rest of the alien.
The ork, still looking ahead towars the girl that suddenly wasn't there, seemed to register only in that moment that it was injured and let out a loud roar, less out of pain and more out of confusion and anger regarding its newfound state.
Ismail struggled to turn around and saw the girl behind them, her scythe rotated in a way suggesting a vertical slash had been executed, with traces of ork blood sparcely staining the blade.
The cry of its brethren roused the other greenskin, who charged towards the girl with its spear, howling savagely. She evaded its brutal yet easy to read attack and, after twirling her blade, she cuts it down with a swift and precise slash.
The dismembered ork immediately tried to hack her with its blade, but the young lady parried the blow and countered with a diagonal swing that bisected the wounded xenos.
For a split everything was quiet.
Then a gunshot erupted from the Nob's gun, the girl narrowingly avoiding the unexpected bullet.
The Nob was getting back on its feet, visibly angry. Still pointing the gun at this new enemy, it yelled:
"HEY 'UMIE, HOW DARE YER STOMP'N' MA BOYZ AN STEAL'N MA CHOPPA?!
The young lady froze up for an instant, seemingly stunned by the fact that the Ork had just spoken to her. She looked at her weapon, then back at the Nob, shock quickly replaced by cold fury, and began slowly walking towards the beast.
"Crescent Rose is my weapon, not yours."
The ork fired his gun several times, some shots missing its target by a wide margin due to bad aim, while the others were expertly blocked and parried by swift motions of her weapon.
"It is not a "choppa". It is a scythe."
The scythe wielder was now running towards the greenskin. The Nob fired one more time, with a shot that would have hit her right in her chest, had she not dissolved into three clusters of petals that, an instant later, merged together behind the greenskins' back.
The reformed girl quickly hit the ork in the trapezius muscle, hooking its body in the curve of her blade.
"It's also a customizable high impact sniper rifle."
"Wot?"
"It's also a gun".
And as she said that with a grin, she pulled a trigger. The Nob had no time to further process what just happened, nor to fight back, because a shot was fired, its recoil causing the blade to sever its body in half.
Ismail had watched the entire scene, rejoicing at the well deserved death of the xenos. When the fight ended, however, another emotion soon started to take hold in his heart: fear.
The girl in front of him was not normal.
No regular human could turn into flower petals and teleport in an instant. Unless...
His fear grew as he realized what she probably was: a psyker, and an unsanctioned one, judging by her lack of heraldry from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
The teachings of Ministorum priests about the foulness of the mutants and the dangers posed by psykers instantly filled his mind and, as the girl started hurrying towards his direction, he found himself searching for his gun, in a desperate attempt to defend himself.
When she crouched in front of him, Ismail finally had a close look at her face.
Silver eyes were gazing at him, exuding genuine concern for his state.
Her mouth forming a tiny but gentle smile, she said to him, with a tone that tried to be reassuring but couldn't mask completely her worry for his current condition:
"Hey, are you alright?"
Something resonated within the man after seeing her face and hearing those words, banishing his previous thoughts of hate and suspicion: he didn't know why, but it was as if he could sense, with absolute certainty, that the young girl in front of him would not harm him, and only wished to help.
"Pure" was the last word Ismail thought, before the adrenaline rush ended and the shock from his wound finally got the better of him and made him faint.