The Feathered Warrior Chapter 4

Madfantasy: heya heya !! I've finally released the latest chapter of THE Feathered Warrior ! Wheee ! I'm so sorry for taking so long, but better late than never, right ? I've already got the next two chapters plotted and planned out, so I'd write em out as soon as possible !

(Chibi Kuja floats out from Madfantasy's imagination bubble) Chibi Kuja : Bow to me, the greatest Sorcerer of Terra and Gaia ! Mwahahah, I'm always so charming. (Smiles to himself and grooms in front of a mirror) Madfantasy: Aww. so sweet. (huggles the stuffings out of the little thing) Go back to Skaerpekoe, you little darling, the readers are waiting.

Presenting the long awaited The Feathered Warrior, Chapter 4 !

Madfantasy: How was that ? More will be coming up, you hang in there !

Chibi Kuja: Of cause.

*****



Night Strike --------------

Unprepared and largely impromptu, Kuja set out with the little girl. The night was very dark and chilly when they made their way into town. They sneaked in the shadows, cast by the silvery moonlight upon the sandy floor. The sky was almost an empty blackness except for the new moon and three or four weak stars.

Looking around, Kuja noticed that the buildings in the area were all rather short, with the tallest block at about four or five storeys high. The rest of the village houses were built like terraces about two to three storeys high, and they were mostly built on stakes to prevent the high tide from flooding the interiors. The ground was gently sloping upwards like an incredibly flat hill.

The central, tallest block, which sat at the highest point of the village, was made with stone and something that Kuja thought was clay cement. Some buildings that they passed were made of bamboos and other type of strange natural materials that the sorcerer had never seen before. As Kuja followed the small girl, he had to squint hard to make out her shadow-like form, even though she was just a few pace ahead.

They slipped quietly along one long row of shop houses and stopped under a window.

"Here, go in!" the young lady gestured towards the wooden hut. They creep up a few wooden steps and onto a timber path just outside the house.

Kuja reached up to climb in. In doing that, he rolled off the windowpane and tumbled into the house. The girl entered easily through the gaping doorway. Settling under the windowpane, with their backs against the wall beneath the window, Kuja on the left and the girl on the right, the two small people began to make some plans. She dropped a rolled scroll on the floor between the both of them.

The bakery shop was deserted. Constructed entirely of wooden planks, it consisted of a neat square-shaped room with a large door in the middle of the far wall where they were facing. Two rows of empty glass and wood display units sat at either side of the room, made to allow customers to sight the rows of products on their sides as they enter. They were sitting near one of the display units. There were also several cupboards and a cashier's counter at a corner of the room close to the entrance.

"I haven't gotten to know your name yet!" Kuja said, as he rubbed his sore back. He growled under his breath for disgracing himself in such an anxious situation.

"I'm Elfia, and my daddy's is really smart." Elfia boasted, her voice full of pride.

"I'm Kuja, the greatest Sorcerer on the face of Gaia and Terra, and my daddy is an idiot." Kuja used the exact same tone that Elfia did. He wondered if Garland could even be considered his daddy at all, but since his old friend Sarcasm was tickling his tongue, he couldn't help but mock a little. Garland was an idiot anyway, he thought, a Dead idiot at that, probably shivering pitifully in the Fairy Council's Freezing chamber right now. He scoffed to himself.

The two looked at each other in silent amusement for a few moments before they realized that they shouldn't be wasting time. Simultaneously, they turned their heads towards the floor at the rolled scroll. Elfia unrolled the parchment scroll, showing the map of Skaerpekoe to our sorcerer.

The brownish paper contained a rough sketch of the layouts of the village, drawn in dark green crayon. It depicted coconut trees, sandy beaches, a sun and long rows of houses, arranged in a big square. Inside that, rows were built facing each other and arranged in the general shape of a cross. One arm of the cross opened towards the entrance of the village. In between the spaces were a few scattered small huts. In the middle of the cross were a few big boxes marking several isolated but seemingly important buildings. The red crayon marks there read "Skaerpekoe Square."

"This is my rough sketch of the Skaerpekoe Village," explained Elfia, "This is the town square." She said, pointing at the middle of the cross where the seemingly important buildings were marked. "And we call each side of the village by the direction it faces. The entrance of this village faces west, and we are in a building on the West Street," she continued, pointing to a row of houses, "We're in Aunt Beeker's Bakery shop."

Nice name, Kuja thought sarcastically.

"We are supposed to find out where the bandits are hiding, flog them, and do something to their leader so that they won't come back."

Kuja pondered the map for a while, trying to come up with some plans. He lifted his little right hand and curled his fingers under his chin, just as he used to whenever he went into some serious calculating when he was 'bigger'. Perhaps they should mutilate the bandit leader's face, or shave his hair bald. Any sensible being ought to be aghast at such distortion of himself... but wait, maybe that only apply to The Great Kuja.

"Don't stare at me," he mumbled as Elfia stared at him for a rather long time, her eyes big, round and almost immobile.

"O-tay." She sat down and watched Kuja, fascinated by the cute small thing that he was.

Just as the outlines of an assault plan made their way into our clever Sorcerer's head, a muffled outburst of laughter made both of them jump. They scurried like mice to a corner of a house and hid behind the cashier's counter, Elfia almost squashing Kuja by diving into position. A thin beam of orange light sliced through the opening of a door.

The pungent smell of alcohol drifted out.

"What noise was that?" someone snarled in a gruffly voice. The person at the door looked around. They must have heard the sound when Kuja fell into the shop.

"Nuthin' boss," the man responded, "just a cat chasing a mice!" he then mimicked the sound of a cat being chased away. Several others in the room roared with laughter as the man at the door retreated into the light and closed it, leaving Elfia and Kuja in the shadows.

Immediately, the two tiptoed towards the door like cunning little pixies. Just as Elfia reached the door, Kuja accidentally tripped over a protruding nail's head in the loose floorboard and fell flat on his face, hands outstretched. The floorboard that he and Elfia were on flipped around and dumped both of them onto the sandy packed ground under the floor. Enlightened of the duo's weight, it creaked, flipped back and fell into its original place with a slap.

"What was that noise!" the drunken voice of the Boss came through the door above. "It was a cat, I tell you!" another voice said. Soon Kuja and Elfia heard uneven but noisy steps, as though the boss was dissatisfied with the answer and had moved to investigate. The door was shoved open and it slammed roughly against the wall, sending bits of woods flying into the air. The disgruntled man looked around, took a long drink from a large green whisky flask in his hand, burped and moved back in, shutting the door as gently as he had opened it.

"Well done, Kuja!" Elfia whispered happily, "now we can spy on them easily!"

She was on fours, looking up at the floorboard, which was around a foot above her head. Kuja stood with ease and rubbed his nose with unmatched fury. "Miserable piece of metal!" he declared, "Offensive obstruction! How dare it cross my path?"

Kuja snuck stealthily across the floor (grumbling as he did) after Elfia. They moved silently over the packed ground and stopped when they were right under the room where the men were. A yellow light overflowed the room and filtered into the bottom in thin strips through the floorboards. Looking up through a small space between two of the boards, Elfia grinned. There were three men, one in brown clothes, the second in gray, and the last in black. Their boss, so drunk with his alcohol, was dozing off on an old chair. In a matter of minutes, he was snoring loudly.

"Look, Kuja!" she hissed softly, "That big bad punk, he's what we're looking for! Once we've got him, we can thwap all the rest easily!"

Just as she spoke, an old woman shuffled into view. She was thin and frail, looking like an old gnarled willow tree in a plain faded yellow dress. She wore a pair of small silver-rimmed glasses and her snowy white hair was tied to the back of her head in a small bun. A red wool scarf was around her neck, protecting her from the midnight chill.

"It's the village baker," Elfia explained very softly, "She's really famous for the cakes she make!"

The man in gray stumbled over to her. Obviously, the three followers of the boss were drunk, too.

"Hurry up already!" He hollered demandingly at the old woman, "You'd better make your cakes as soon as possible! Or else, we'd burn down your miserable shop!" He then shoved the old woman roughly and growled.

"How vile of them to do that!" Kuja growled. It was definitely way beyond his gentlemanly nature to be physically rude to others. (Perhaps partially due to his feminine physique...?) Most of the time, he'd rather order redundant troops of dumb black mages to carry explosives to any offensive person's house during a family dinner and just destroy about fifty houses in the vicinity in the convenient process. Sometimes huge fire spells work really well, too, but then he'd get tired of instructing those slow- learning, puny mages.

Even as the bandit spoke, a strong fragrance of baked flour and butter filled the room. The aroma drifted through the cracks in the floorboard and assaulted our Sorcerer's nose. He felt hungry and realized that he hadn't eaten a meal in two days. A loud rumble came from his stomach as it complained of the aroma around it.

"What was that?" the man in brown leapt out of his seat, shocked by the strange sound.

As the man in the brown clothes leapt up, he tripped over himself. Falling on his side, he landed on several loose boards, which flipped around and dumped him onto the packed earth where Kuja and Elfia were. The boards then swung back into their positions after the weight was deposited.

"Did you give out gas, Pig?" the other two hooted in their drunkenness and roared with laughter.

The man in brown crawled on his fours in confusion. He was a dirty, obese man, clothed in filthy shirts that used to be white, but were now yellow, and a big brown overcoat. His pants were torn in several places. His face was caked with brown dirt, and his hair was a in a mess. His shoes stank, and he reeked of alcohol.

"Filthy hog," Kuja murmured.

"He does look like a pig as they said, don't you think, Kuja?" Elfia giggled.

"Worse, I reckon," Kuja snickered evilly.

The drunk caught Elfia's remark. Getting angry, he threw his beer flask at her, narrowly missing. He made a lewd remark about Elfia's family in incomprehensible foul language.

Meanwhile, Kuja, deciding that he had humiliated his grace too many times for the night, made up his mind to redeem his image. After all, he had always been majestic, elegant and charming, so he thought, and thinks still. He did not appreciate the man's impudence to a lady. He walked between Elfia and the man, stood steadily, legs slightly parted, hands on hips and ready for action.

"Your smell offends my senses." Kuja stated, sounding extremely haughty. He slapped the man on his face with a piece of driftwood he had found on the floor, causing him to stop wide-eyed with shock. He had thought that Kuja was a plush toy. Kuja made a sarcastic face and mocked that he had dirtied the poor piece of wood. He said in elaborate, flowery vocabularies something that was supposed to be 'politely' rude, while the man stared blankly at him.

"Maybe I should pick on someone with my brilliance, intelligence and honor." Kuja crooned, partially to himself, "My remarks are superflorescent. I do not think that he even has a percentage of my wisdom to understand what I say! My intelligence is meant only for great minds like mine. And I have the greatest mind here."

Lewd remarks above the floor joked that the Man in Brown Clothes had been eaten by a whale, as Kuja was caught in praising himself. The fat man regained his senses. His eyes bulged with apparent anger as he turned his focus on our Feathered Sorcerer who started peppering his fury with his sarcastic words. As the fat chap tried to catch Kuja, he scuttled agilely away. He could stand to his full height of one foot and ten inches and run however he wished to. Finally, he decided that he had enough of playing cat and mouse with the big man.

"Undeserving lowlife, Think you deserve to touch but a hair on me?" Kuja proclaimed as he dodged skillfully when the man pounced towards him. He ran at the man's face as the big dude landed on his stomach. Then, poising sophisticatedly just for a fleeting moment, leapt and round-housed the man in the eye with the bottom of his high-heeled boot with a sickening squish.

Meanwhile, in the hidden hamlet by the sea, Elfia's daddy and grandmother were reading by the oil lamp. Some other men and women were with them, eating bread peacefully when they heard a horrific, screeching wail slicing through the quiet of the night. Everyone raised his or her heads at the direction of the howl.

"My, what was that, I wonder." Elfia's daddy said.

"Sounds like a sick hog giving birth." the old lady remarked, while everyone nodded, and went back to his or her business.

"Well done, Kuja!" Elfia praised excitedly.

"Thank you for your praise, my lady," Kuja replied in elegance. The man's hand reached up weakly, trying to grab Kuja and punish the mean little him, but the dignified sorcerer stood his ground, raised his piece of driftwood, smacked it on the fat guy's forehead and clobbered the man out cold without turning. He then bowed gracefully, tucking one hand in front of his tummy, looking just like an adult.

"That's one down and three more!" Elfia applauded for Kuja as she smiled happily.





Madfantasy : Well ? How was it ? I hope you've enjoyed reading it ! I've got the next two chapters planned out and writing them shouldn't be a problem. Meanwhile, please don't forget to reward me with a few reviews ! :3