xXx
Valeria stirred, muttering and shifting. The most horrible dream… She remembered drumming, all out of synch, and whispering and insanity in the dark, the most dank foul smell. She shrugged, blinking sleep out of her eyes, yawning, stretching.
She looked down, startled. She was drifting in the breeze, fifty feet above the city street, dressed in her panties and a tee shirt. She blinked, scrubbed at her eyes. "Never flown in my sleep before," she murmured to herself.
A power clamped down on her, not leaving her sense enough to scream; she struggled wildly, but the attack was too fierce, too sudden, and it tasted of desperation. Her mind writhed under the iron grip then grew still; she was no longer her own.
A few minutes later, she drifted down into the park, towards the concrete building over its back fence. Her eyes were empty and terrible, her features a writ of pain, absent as her body slid silently through the air towards captivity.
Another woman stood on a rise not far away, her face contorted by frustration, her fists opening and closing. The ninja woman Lock desperately turned the situation over in her mind, trying to figure out how she could attempt to save Valeria without committing suicide.
No ideas came to her.
Valeria floated to the door, and it opened to admit her. She disappeared inside. Lock settled with her back to a tree, deep in thought, wondering how to proceed. Her head drooped as she became one with her surroundings, working through plan after plan. There was no one she could call who would arrive in time to stop what was happening inside that building, and even if one or more of her allies could arrive in time, they could do little against the ninja gathered there. Against their captive telepath. Against the Jonin.
So Lock waited for an idea or a shift in the situation to present itself. Less than an hour later, that's exactly what happened.
A faint whine and a hiss, and a teleportation stepping disk slid up from the ground, leaving a reddish blonde sorceress in its wake.
"Lock?" Illyana said uncertainly. "I can't scry on Valeria. Do you know where she is?"
Lock was immediately on her feet. "I feared they had somehow captured you as well," she said, touching Illyana's shoulder as though to convince herself the young woman was really standing there. "As long as they only have one of you, perhaps their Great Ceremony will fail."
"I don't mean to be captured," Illyana said with an arch of her eyebrow. Then her eyes widened in alarm.
Lock stood with her back to the sorceress. "I can assure that they only get one of you," she said softly.
In that tense moment, Lock thumbed her slim knife loose in its scabbard, and Illyana braced to teleport.
Lock sighed, and turned to look into Illyana's eye. "I am not like them. You do not deserve death for doing nothing more than attracting their attention. The way of life is riskier than the way of death, but the rewards can be much greater. I am committed to the way of life. Please excuse my lapse, the stress is getting to me."
"Sure, no problem," Illyana said warily. "So what's the plan? Valeria is in that building?"
"Yes," Lock nodded. "The Jonin has captured a powerful telepath and bent him to the will of the ninja. He summoned Valeria. When he calls," she shrugged, "there's little any mortal can do to resist."
"Whoah," Illyana said uncertainly. "So what chance do we have? The ninja alone were enough, don't you think?"
Lock nodded. "The way of the ninja is the way of overwhelming odds, surprise attacks, and cheating. Expect nothing less. I have formed a plan."
"Let's hear it," Illyana said, shifting uncomfortably and looking at the concrete square of the building.
Lock nodded. "You take out part of the wall on two sides of the building. You move in one side, I'll come in the other. Whatever happens, don't be distracted. Do your part, teleport Valeria out, then you two just stay in your underspace for a while. Okay?"
"What about you?" Illyana asked in a small voice.
"Today," Lock said, her eyes hard, "I will face the way of the ninja. Don't worry about me. And a word of advice. If we fail… don't let them take you alive." Her eyes said much that her voice didn't, and Illyana nodded meekly.
They moved away from each other.
xXx
The Jonin presided over the Great Ceremony as he had been destined to do since he was born under the bloody fingernail of new moon so long ago. The time was right. The chanting was in a holding pattern, waiting for the inevitable interruption without which the ceremony would fail. Two keys, the prophecy had said, two keys would be needed to unlock the barriers between the Beast and the world.
One floated before him in a chalked circle, slowly spinning, unconscious, her arms gripping her shoulders and her head lolling to the side. She would be the perfect vessel for the Beast to inhabit.
Silver threads almost too fine to see or feel were collected in the Jonin's palm. Each thread traced through the air to wrap around the head of a needle, a dozen needles in the chi meridians of Charles Xavier. Xavier lay flat, his head rolled to the side, bleeding from his nose and mouth and eyes. He was dying. The Jonin smiled. In a few minutes, that wouldn't matter; not to Xavier, not to anyone else.
The Beast would touch the earth and all life would swirl to dust in a maelstrom of flame and darkness.
Right on schedule, two portions of wall flared and vanished.
Allow them in, the Jonin said to his ninja in the silent speech. Xavier feebly struggled against the Jonin's domination; was he trying to warn them? To free Valeria? The Jonin contemptuously sent his will through the threads, into Xavier's body, and the telepath subsided once again.
The two women attacked as one, leaping through the holes on opposite sides of the building. The ninja fell back, forming a ring around Valeria and the chanters.
The Jonin watched
Lock, felt the indecision; she had two objectives as she surveyed the
situation the instant she arrived. To kill the Jonin; that was her
purpose initially and she would not abandon it until one of them was
dead. But there lay Xavier; could she abandon him to his fate?
His
smile widened as she moved. She would choose the path of life.
And she would die.
She sprang to get around the ninja, and they moved to intercept her. Blades whickered around her, slashing her clothes to ribbons as she wildly gyrated, an elemental expression of painfully refined death that transcended violence and instead became a dance. Distance and time were acute as she spun into the cloying stench of decay and incense that flowed out of the breached wall. Her every motion was measured by the breadth of a hair as the ninja moved to stop her, to kill her. She fought for more than life; she sought to pass through their wall.
Her shortsword moved faster than the eye could follow, snipping through throats and arteries and pressure points as she tensed and relaxed, whirring into the teeming mass of dark cloth, catching lethal strikes a quarter inch from the killing point, taking a dozen cuts in the first seconds and managing to take them in meat and bone instead of in the sensitive places, the weak flesh that would stop the whole body if it were damaged.
She moved like a spirit bereft of flesh, then in one shimmering perfect moment she spun clear, within sword's reach of the Jonin, who remained seated, watching her.
If you try to free him he will die, the Jonin thought to her in that moment.
Her eyes narrowed as she moved. Maybe, she thought, maybe.
In a single clear ringing note higher than the human ear could detect, the silver strands leading to the Jonin's hand separated as her unnaturally sharp sword slid through space they occupied.
Xavier clenched, locked in a scream his body lacked the strength to make audible.
Illyana stared at Valeria, who drifted oblivious to the battle. The ninja stood between Illyana and Valeria; the young woman struggled to call a stepping disc, but there were wards and ancient sigils she had no knowledge of; they locked the building within its own space.
Illyana would have to enter the building to make this work. She was trembling.
Her breath came short and shallow as Lock vanished into the mass of ninja, all a swirling morass of shadow punctuated by gurgles and puffs of blood that whipped up into the air. Her hand flexed, and her Soulsword was called from its resting place into her hand. She managed a thin scream as she charged into the building.
In that moment, the Jonin snapped both hands shut. The keys. They were within his grasp.
The time had come.
The world would end.
Illyana lashed out wildly at the ninja, who did not counter-attack. They instead focused on her, on deflecting her. Illyana felt suddenly dizzy in the stench of incense, with the alien buzzing of the ninja chanting ringing in her skull as though of all those in the world only she could hear it; in the background, laughing. Could that man seated on the cushion be the Jonin?
She struggled to teleport Valeria, but she could not focus on that pillar, she could not grasp what was within the simple chalk circle on the floor. Then the ninja surrounded her as Lock whirled up by the Jonin.
Illyana felt suddenly cold, vulnerable. A thought rang through her mind; summon aid! This battle was beyond her! And almost in a daze, she reached through time and space, into her realm, for the one demon who could join her. In a flash, the disc appeared—
All hell broke loose. She didn't remember the demon being so huge… then as she brought it, as the disc opened the creature forced its way in, though all the world closed in on that moment, on that place, to stop it. There was a chest rattling cough that startled dust from the concrete walls.
Something was coming.
Illyana desperately tried to close her own portal, but it was too late. Something was coming through, and nothing she could do would stop it.
In that moment she realized she had been betrayed. She also realized that unless something changed dramatically in the next few seconds, it wouldn't matter any more.
The Jonin's thin cackle rose, twining with Illyana's scream.
The lock was breached. The Beast was summoned.
The Beast tore reality by the corrupting touch of its presence as it ripped its way clear of the stepping disk. Already its demon form was rippling, splintering. The thing that had masqueraded as her pet had no form. But it was here. It was too late. Illyana fell on her back and scrabbled for the corner, shocked out of her senses, forgotten.
The creature bounded through the ninja, who let it pass, and then it sprang up to latch onto Valeria—
In that moment all became clear. The Beast needed a form, and the Jonin had found it one that was unstoppable—
Valeria struggled clear of Xavier's haze in time to catch a glimpse of what leaped at her, but it was too late to evade the mighty spring. It crashed into her with no sound, and she was forced to the ground by the weight of the thing. It began to push through her defenses, casually and ruthlessly and inexorably.
I AM THE BEAST it Spoke, and some of the ninja gripped at their chests or heads, trying to contain the blood that flowed from them as the power of its Thought rolled out from it. I WILL BRING FLAME I WILL BRING DARKNESS I WILL BRING THE WINTER THAT NEVER ENDS I AM DESPAIR
"No!" Lock screamed, her voice thin in her own ears. And the Jonin threw his head back in unholy joy; his life was complete, his destiny fulfilled. Death to him now would be an afterthought.
Lock caught a faint plea, as from a great distance, and she quickly glanced to see Xavier trying to reach for her. Oh, I am dying, he thought, and she dropped her weapon and knelt at his side. His spark of life, so weak…
Live. Her command to him was a whisper in the maelstrom of the Beast's malignance, but she felt Xavier grip it with his remaining strength. The will to live had been stamped out in him, almost entirely. She breathed on the embers that remained, and he fought to heed her call.
For a long moment Lock closed her eyes, heedless of her danger. The way of life… it was riskier.
The rewards were so much greater.
All the strength she had left flowed through a link she forged with Xavier, flowed into his mind, his will. She was completely vulnerable; one strike would slay her. But she focused on Xavier, on reviving him, on bringing him back to a world he could recognize after his long sojourn into darkness.
Xavier revived.
He lashed out.
Valeria pulled all of her self-hood, everything that made her who she was into her center to battle the dark force that was casually overwhelming her; this was worse than any rape could ever be, for this creature flowed into every part of what made her an individual. This creature was stealing her.
"I am a child of the sun!" she managed to gasp as the creature of darkness casually leaned its weight on her flagging defenses. Her strength was gone—
Then another strength came, she did not know from where. Suddenly she could feel her self again, she could feel the sun, and she drove into the darkness that was becoming her with all her might. It was as though she was rocketing to the surface of a deep, dark lake; she broke the surface, triumphantly who she was, startling the creature that clung to her.
"I deny your primal night," she hissed, eyes flaring. "It shall never return. I am a child of the sun. You cannot use me for death."
She locked with the Beast, it was pushed out to her skin. They struggled fiercely with minds, with bodies, with spirits; if any of her three defenses failed she would be utterly corrupted.
Illyana cowered in the corner, her eyes pouring blood as the shockwaves of evil rolled from the Beast and crashed over her. She was forgotten, her part was played.
The ninja surrounded Xavier and Lock; Lock revived just enough to blearily look up and see her death poise to end the contest. She managed a smile, her teeth pink from the blood in her mouth.
With a peculiar thudding sound, the Jonin's head rebounded from the wall behind his seat. His body slumped to the side, decapitated. The ninja spun.
One of their number tugged off her mask; the others were genuinely shocked.
Silent stood, her eyes riveting them to the ground, as she drew her other sai and spun the weapons. Prepare yourselves for the First Rule, she said in the silent speech. Then she was moving.
The tips of her sai touched the ninja as she whirled past them. She was one with the hopelessly chaotic fog of incense. The ninja whirled and slashed, but she was untouchable. Their training was sound, but they were out of their depth and their leader had been slain before their eyes by one the might of their clan had been unable to stop.
It was not battle. It was slaughter.
Lock swooned, consciousness slipping away from her as the poison from the ninja weapons and the shock of her dozens of wounds caught up with her.
Valeria was locked in a delicate balance of strength with the Beast, but she was wearing down too fast and it seemed inexhaustible. Desperate sips of air were all her tight torso could manage for breathing, and as she refused to bend she began to break.
Then a voice, in her mind, clear and sharp; I am sorry we never met, the voice said with a touch of regret.
Power rushed into her; mortal, raw power that tasted of blood and the soul. She realized in that final moment that the entire life force of the man on the stone slab was surrounding her and lifting her up. She took his energy, focused it, and flared raw defiance into the shadow that sought to claim her.
For a shimmering second the Beast was blown clear, teetering on the edge of losing balance and falling backward. It took one step back, outside the circle—
Illyana screamed as she focused her entire will into a stepping disk that lashed into existence behind the Beast. In one last push, Valeria took a short step and pounded her mightiest blow into the thing of shadow. It lost its balance and its power, knocked back into the shimmering disk. Illyana slashed through a disk of her own.
Valeria collapsed, her chest wracked in dry sobs. Xavier sagged, his muscles relaxing, a faint smile on his face. Silent whipped her sais around once more.
The battle was over.
