Si uno adhuc proelio Romanos vincemus, funditus peribimus!
She winced as the healer pulled the wrappings tight around her chest. It had taken her a few minutes to explain to him why he shouldn't wrap them over her breasts, but once she'd shucked out of her armor to give him better access he'd understood. She'd felt decidedly strange being half naked in front of strange aliens, and with the climate-controlling undergarment of her armor around her waist, the heat and humidity of the ship wasn't feeling that comfortable.
She needn't have worried, although she might have felt insulted by the healer's opinions about all the ways her body was disgusting to his eyes. He was, however, professional and by the time he was done he had immobilized her damaged rib cage as best he could. Now all she had to do was figure out how to breathe. She thanked him for his help, even though she had wanted to kill him a few minutes earlier when he had coated her wounds with the accursed blue fluid from her medical kit. She began to re-don her armor when the weaponsmaster came into the healer's chamber, fully equipped himself with a wide array of weapons, many of which she'd never seen before.
"Are you ready to hunt, young blood?", he asked, a growl of concern in his voice. She stretched gingerly, feeling the pull of her bindings, but the pain wasn't nearly as bad as she expected. She experimentally swung her arms a little, settling her armor in place at the same time she tested her body's response to her commands, before looking towards Blade and grinning behind her mask.
"As ready as I'm going to be" she commented as she swung herself down from the examination table. She stumbled a little as she landed, and Blade reached out a hand to steady her, but she waved him off. "I'll be fine." She gathered up the weapons she had removed to get her armor off, and followed the weaponsmaster out of the healer's chamber and down a corridor she didn't recognize.
"Where are we going?" she asked, as they ascended a ramp upwards.
"The armory" was the only answer Blade gave her, not even slowing his pace. She shrugged to herself, she was used to not getting much information from Yautja, her trainer had been the same for as long as she'd known him. As they turned a corner, she let out a gasp of surprise at what she saw.
The walls were lined with every kind of weapon imaginable, and the two Yautja in there were busy selecting from the assortment on offer, clipping the pieces they selected to various parts of their armor. She stopped, trying to take in the view, and Blade turned to her, clicking impatiently.
"You can select from them as you wish, but first you need to be briefed on the hunt." She blinked under her mask in surprise, while he descended into a sunken well in the center of the room. He motioned impatiently for her to take position in a spot just opposite him, and as she did so a seat rose from the deckplates. She settled back onto the stool-like seat as it rose higher, until it stopped, leaving her a good ten feet from the deck below. The weaponsmaster gestured, and a holographic display appeared between them, much higher in resolution than the one her computer could provide. He changed the image until a wireframe of the ship and the surrounding warehouse appeared, ghostly transparent.
"The initial attack on the ramp failed, the two Yautja were able to initiate the ship's defense mechanisms and destroy several kainde amedha, giving them time to seal the inner door to the ship. One of them fell in the attack, we do not know how many of the hard meat were killed." She nodded as he changed the image, zooming in on the rear of the ship. Even though he had just told her that one of the hunters had died, his voice remained steady and businesslike, and she didn't offer any comment on the matter.
"Unfortunately, at the same time they launched a separate attack on the rear of the ship. We are not sure how, but presumably they used their own blood to create an entrance inside one of the drive tubes, and entered that way. The drives have been damaged, we are not sure the extent, as we sealed that section off as well." She pointed to the rear of the ship as it glowed red.
"So they're inside the ship in that area?" He growled an affirmative in reply.
"The inner doors are not as strong as the ramp door, it is only a matter of a short time before the kainde amedha will breach them and begin to move through the ship." She watched as he manipulated the image to show an internal schematic of the ship, and could see the resulting access the hard meat would have once they breached the inner doors. She cocked her head as she looked over the internal layout, then looked to him curiously.
"Why are they using the corridors? There's a lot of crawlspaces and vents in that area, if I'm reading this diagram right, they could easily make it through those." In response, he zoomed the image in on one of the service crawlspaces leading from the compromised area of the ship.
"Yautja have hunted kainde amedha for a very long time, young blood, and our ships are designed to prevent such things. Any space that could be so used has energy grids at intervals through them, and the insides are lined with the same resin the hard meat produce." She looked at him then started laughing, shaking her head. He looked at her and growled a query.
"Basically what you're telling me is the ship comes complete with bug screens." He growled a perfectly serious affirmative, and she laughed again, but a clicked note of annoyance sobered her. He zoomed the image out to show the ship and warehouse once more.
"Somewhere out there is the queen." The sound of her sharp intake of breath escaped from behind her mask. "The surviving Yautja from the ramp saw a glimpse of her before the inner door was sealed. The Elder believes her presence means we will be facing the entire hive. We do not know how many that will involve, though."
"So what's the plan? I've never hunted with others before, except that one time when we went after eggs." He growled in understanding, pointing to the rear section of the ship again.
"We let them come in." She looked at him, her disbelief must have been obvious even from within her mask, as he clicked a laugh. "The queen will be unable to board the ship, she will be too large. This means that we can hunt the drones she sends in to the ship. Once we have killed as many of those as possible, we can then go outside and hunt her." She nodded and growled an affirmative in the Yautja language without realizing it, but cocked her head curiously. He understood her confusion, and elaborated.
"There are only ten of us now, not enough to face an entire hive with any guarantee of destroying it. The Elder has already set the ship to self-destruct should the life-signs of all the hunters present cease. It is questionable if there are enough of us to hunt a queen as it stands." He turned the holographic display off and as the stool-like seats began to sink to the floor once more, he continued. "Separating them makes them more manageable. The challenge of taking on the complete hive is less important than cleansing the area of the kainde amedha presence. " She nodded in understanding.
"So what do we do?" she asked as they reached the floor and he walked over to an equipment cupboard inset into the wall. He fumbled in one of the pouches that hung from his belt as he withdrew a strange gun shaped device from the storage locker, then turned to face her. He held up a small capsule, dwarfed between two claws.
"Do you hunt with us?" She blinked, looking at the device he was holding then to the impassive faceshields of the weaponsmaster's mask. She was ready to retort with a smart-alec response but something about the way he'd asked stopped her. She replayed the conversation they'd just had in her mind, why had he bothered to brief her if wasn't sure she was going to ... As her mind caught up with the math she understood finally. He had said there were only ten of them now, but by her count there were only eight Yautja from the ship, and her trainer, left. He'd included her in the count! She realized what the device must be.
"I would be honored to hunt with you." He purred loudly with pleasure, and she heard answering purrs from behind her. She turned slightly to see that the two Yautja who had been arming as she and Blade had entered the chamber hadn't left yet, and were voicing their approval of her decision. An inordinate sense of pride filled her to swelling, and for a moment she felt a unique kinship with these utterly alien creatures.
Blade slotted the device into the injector he'd removed from the storage compartment before pressing the business end against her abdomen, just beneath her sternum. He depressed the trigger quickly, and she felt a sharp stab as the implant was injected into her, coming to rest close by her heart.
Hers was now one of the life-signs the ship would notice the end of.
"Can we finally go hunting now?", she asked, sweetly.
-
It had all seemed so simple on the holographic display in the armory. Let the kainde amedha breach through the drive compartment to the rest of the ship, pick them off one by one. Just one minor problem – no-one told the kainde amedha about their part in the whole process. Using the same technique to breach the hull as they had to access the drive compartments, the hard meat had broken their way through the hull on the topmost deck, in the control room, catching the hunters completely off guard. Instead of being able to face the black aliens in the confines of the one corridor from the drive compartment, the ship was now crawling with them.
She had an advantage over the Yautja at the moment, she had switched her mask to the visible light spectrum, natural for her but uncomfortable to the thermal-sensitive vision of the hunters, negating the kainde amedha's lack of radiating heat as a factor. As a result, she saw the sudden shift from the corner of her eye before the alien could reach her, spinning and dropping down while extending one arm to launch the weighted metallic net mounted to the underside of her forearm at the leaping death. The ends pulled the mesh tight about its body as she rolled under it before it came crashing to the deckplates just behind her, the ends wrapping around each other like the ends of a bolas and trapping it within.
As it struggled furiously against its bondage, hissing in its rage, she rose quickly to her feet, stepping cautiously towards the writhing black mass. She removed her spear from the mounting on her thigh, squeezing the handle to extend the vicious ends, then stabbed through the alien's head before the tightening net could be melted by its corrosive blood. It gave a screech as the silvered metal penetrated through its skull into the tissue beneath, but continued to fight the net. In the end, she had to fire several of the Y-shaped barbed arrow points from the weapon underneath her other forearm into the creature's head before it finally succumbed to the damage and quivered in death, just as the net parted, destroyed by the pale black/green ichor oozing from the body.
She checked her spear tip for similar damage, but was relieved to see the resistant coating was still holding up. As she retracted the shaft and replaced it against her thigh, she slapped her other hand against the mounting that had held the net, releasing it from her arm to drop with a clatter against the deck. There was no way she could recover the net, and she had no clue how she could reload the net gun even if she could.
This was her fourth kill so far, and her second on her own. She'd been separated from the weaponsmaster during a furious melee a little while ago and one deck lower. Since then she hadn't seen any living Yautja, although she'd passed the torn remains of one a moment before - presumably he had fallen to the alien she'd just dispatched. Part of her mind wondered how many of them were left, but she put the thoughts to one side and concentrated on letting her senses search for signs of more hard meat.
She knew she was hopelessly lost as far as knowing where she was on the ship was concerned, but she allowed her senses and her instincts to guide her steps through the corridors, trusting that they might not find her rooms, but they'd find her kainde amedha. Her trust was proven when she entered the main council chamber, where she had killed Marisa's murderer, and came face to shiny black head with two kainde amedha. They paused, surprised by her sudden emergence from the side corridor they were about to enter, and she took advantage of their distraction, diving between both of them into a roll, clenching her fists to extend her wristblades as she did so.
As she passed them, she flung her arms out to either side, the blades on one forearm carving into the leg of one of her opponents, but the other missed. As the one she had injured fell to the deckplates, the other turned fast, but she changed her direction of roll, heading sideways, and the tail that daggered downwards to where she would have been bounced off the deck harmlessly with a ringing clang. She rolled back up to her feet just in time to block the alien's claws swiping towards her head, the impact making her arm go numb but the razored edges cutting through the wrist of the kainde amedha.
It reared and stepped backwards, screaming a sibilant cry of pain at its mutilation, and she swept the spear from its mounting point, squeezing it and bringing it around in a wide arc all in one movement, the tip cutting a line through the alien's bony exoskeleton, but failing to penetrate to the skin and organs beneath.
The inertia of her move swung her around so that her back was to the alien. Sensing an advantage, it ran towards her, but she pushed the spear backwards and up, the hard meat's charge driving it onto the tip and down its length. Its remaining talon scraped against her shoulder armor as the creature's arm came within range, but she ignored the attack, reaching around to the spear handle with her other hand then twisting it. The spikes laying flat along the shaft shot up at an angle, their edges carving a path through the kainde amedha's body and vitals, and it screamed before collapsing to the ground.
She twisted the spear shaft again, but it refused to come free from the body. She abandoned the weapon without hesitation, moving to one side as she watched the other hard meat, the one whose leg she had cut into, staggering towards her as best it could. As the dead alien's body began to sink into the widening hole its blood was melting in the deck, she sidestepped twice more, then bent to retrieve the two blades from their homes next to her calves. Straightening up, she reversed the blades so they were resting against her forearms and assumed her accustomed guard position, arms crossed in front of her.
She was shocked when the alien suddenly accelerated. It had been faking! She frantically tried to move from its path but failed, one set of talons cutting across her hip, red hot pain causing her to gasp, the sharp claws parting the alien hide that covered her waist, before the breath was knocked out of her as the alien's bulk hit her, both of them falling to the ground. She tried to bring the blades into play, but realized that if she cut into it where it was right now, its blood would fountain all over her. She turned her head to one side and twisted as the inner jaw shot forwards, passing so close to her that the vicious mouth withdrew back into the hard meat's gaping maw with one of her braids trapped between the teeth.
She screamed from the pain, wrenching her head and was rewarded by the braid, and a piece of scalp, coming away. She bent her legs, getting her feet between her and the alien, and pushed off with all her strength before it could bring its deadly weapon into play again. It fell to one side, then screeched as it overbalanced and tipped through the hole its comrade's body had left in the decking. She rolled back the other way and tried to stand, but her legs wouldn't support her weight. She sat up and slid backwards on her butt until her back was against one wall of the chamber, before taking a deep breath and examining her wound.
It wasn't nearly as deep as it had felt, the hide of her armor must have taken the brunt of the impact. Dull red blood seeped from the four straight gashes just below the horn of her hip bone, and she sighed as she reached around behind her for her medical kit. Quickly, she coated a gauze pad with the blue fluid, pressing it against the wounds to seal them closed, but she was able, barely, to prevent from screaming out. She packed the kit away and replaced it on the back of her armor, but when she tried to stand again she still felt unsteady, so rested back against the wall to catch her breath.
-
She was still there when she sensed a shadow fall over her, but she looked up into the eyeshields she had come to loathe, and perhaps love, over the past few decades. He purred a laugh as he removed his mask, glancing down at her wounds, then across to the hole beside her the alien had created. He looked back and placed one claw on her shoulder gently.
"Only you could decide to fall asleep in the middle of a hunt, surrounded by kainde amedha" he noted, reaching behind her to take out the medical kit she'd replaced what seemed like only moments before. As he opened the kit and withdrew one of the small tube-like injectors, she grinned at him.
"Are we having fun yet?" He bent over her and before she could object pressed the injector to her stomach and triggered it, the stabbing pain of the needle's entrance fading quickly, as she started to feel more alert. She looked at him.
"You never told me there was stimulants in that thing." He looked back at her.
"You never asked", he replied, simply. She sat there with her mouth working a few times before she slapped his shoulder. He growled in amusement, repacking her kit and handing it to her roughly, then paused.
"I am glad to find you still live." She blinked as the loop recording appended "Cally" to the end of his sentence. She inclined her head, and tried standing once more, this time finding it much easier, if she was still a little unsteady on her feet.
"Are we winning?" she asked him, softly. He looked away for a moment before growling an affirmative.
"The ship is clear of kainde amedha, as best we can determine." She nodded as he started leading her out of the chamber.
"Which just leaves queenie. How many of us are left?" He didn't answer for long moments, and when he did she swore she could detect a note of sadness in the tone of his voice.
"Six, now." He paused, then "The weaponsmaster is not amongst them." She stopped, staring at his back. She swallowed back tears and as he turned to face her she braced herself.
"Was his death befitting?" she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. He growled an affirmative, proudly, and she nodded. She didn't trust herself to say anything else, simply beginning to walk again, and he kept step with her side by side until they reached the door that led to the ramp out to the warehouse outside the ship. The other four surviving Yautja were there, various injuries treated and coated in blue. She was glad to see the ship's Elder, the Second, and the healer were three of them, but was surprised the fourth was an unblooded hunter. She inclined her head to that one deeply, growling proudly to him, and he inclined his head in return as the others looked on, checking weapons piled at their feet - They'd obviously re-equipped themselves before meeting here.
No-one commented that she was using the Yautja language, audible and body language both, but her trainer was proud of how far his protege had come in so many areas. He regretted that it had taken the loss of her friend for her to finally show the promise he had looked for for all these long years, briefly considering the rightness of his actions in setting her on this course, but banished everything from his mind but the upcoming battle. He needed to concentrate, the time for such questions would come later. If they survived.
The Second looked at her, noting the state of her armor. When he saw that she had lost her spear he reached down and took one from the pile on the floor and handed it to her. With a squeeze of her hand she tested it, before retracting it and clipping it against her thigh, satisfied. She looked over the other weapons on the floor, then pointed to the gun mounted on her forearm that fired the Y-shaped barbed arrows.
"Is there any way to reload this?" The Second growled a negative, bending down and dragging out two familiar-looking mountings.
"We do not have any additional darts for it here. Replace it with one of these, and mount the other on your other arm. They are similar to the -------- you had as a hand-held weapon before." She nodded, unstrapping the gun and letting it drop to the floor before examining the weapons he handed to her. She recognized the tip of the projectiles standing slightly proud of the muzzle of the weapon as being the same arrows she had used before, in the gun she had lost the night the kainde amedha had almost killed her.
She strapped them to the underside of her forearms, making a mental note that their placement meant she couldn't rotate her wristblades as they'd been modified to do. Once she'd emptied them, she needed to remember to dump them to free her blades for their full deadly effectiveness. Most of the remaining weapons she didn't recognize and so she remained quiet, crouched down as the others prepared themselves. In what seemed too short a time, they all had joined her in a circle, and the Elder spoke.
"The queen will have kainde amedha guarding her. You and you", he pointed to her and the unblooded hunter, "are to deal with them. The rest of us will concentrate on the queen herself. Once the guards are removed, and only once they are removed, may you attack the queen." She growled an assent, echoed by the other hunter. This wasn't going to be a time for personal trophies, the only way to defeat the queen would be to work as a team. The most experienced Yautja amongst them would be relying on the two least experienced to keep the queen's guards off them while they fought her.
The Elder looked around the circle, gaging their readiness. Satisfied, he rose, and they followed suit. He strode to the controls at the door, pressing a sequence to raise the heavy metal shield, and as it came up they watched uneasily to make sure no kainde amedha were waiting on the other side. The coast was clear, and they walked down the ramp into the dark warehouse.
-
Once clear of the ramp they were hit almost immediately, half-a-dozen black bodies launching themselves at the hunters from the darkness. She brought her targeting system online and switched vision modes, her view of the warehouse turning a surreal green and outlining the kainde amedha as the solid red lines of a target lock flashed over one. She triggered the plasma weapon, sending a ball of red fire into the hard meat, blasting it to pieces, the heat vaporizing its acidic blood before it could hit anything. The four experienced hunters ran forwards and she stood shoulder to shoulder with the unblooded one, tracking a second target then a third, rapid firing the hellish energies of her shoulder weapon into them.
She saw one of the remaining kainde amedha head towards the grouped hunters, too close to fire at, and without thinking lifted one of the throwing stars from her armor and as she pressed against the center, the five clawed tips locking into position, sent it spinning in a curving arc. Their paths intersected, the star cutting through the head of the alien and a cloud of dust kicked up as it plowed into the ground. She sensed the star's return path, but she was so focused on watching for additional threats to the hunters that she didn't have time to worry about catching it, instead almost absently plucking it from the air as it came towards her.
The two hunters began to run forwards, trailing the main group towards the furious screeching at one end of the warehouse that she assumed was the queen's location. More kainde amedha tried to intercept the Elder and his group, but the two picked them off before they could get close. She watched as four bolts of plasma emerged from the weapons of the main group, aimed towards one corner of the building, and she gasped as the light they produced on impact gave her the first glimpse of their enemy.
"Oh shit. That's one ugly mother fu ..." she thought, but was distracted by a scrabbling above her. She moved sideways, pushing the other hunter the other way, as an alien landed between them, its claws lashing out to either side. She tried to turn away, but the talons flashed across her mask, scoring deep jagged gouges into and through the alien metal and shattering one eyepiece. As the electronics in her mask shorted out, the eyepiece exploding outwards in a shower of sparks, she grabbed the alien's arm with one hand and slammed her forearm into its elbow. There was a crack as the joint broke against the pressure, and she pulled the now limp arm towards her. The other hunter's spear tip emerged from the front of the alien's head, he had stabbed into it from behind, and it fell to the ground.
With the mask damaged, her vision was black, and she angrily pulled the connectors loose from her mask then yanked it from her face. As it cleared her eyes, she could feel the warm trickle of blood run down her cheek and her neck, but she ignored it. The darkness of the warehouse was lit up by the staccato firing of the energy weapons of the hunters, and the strobe brightness as the electromagnetic bolts struck, but unlike the way they had destroyed the drones, the queen seemed to have better resistance to the power being hurled at her.
The queen had come out of her hiding place now, and was trying to rush towards the hunters. They had split up, the distance between them making it impossible for her to attack them as a group, and as she tried to concentrate on one of them, it opened her up to the fire of the other three. With a quick glance at the hunter beside her, she started running towards the group. As she ran, she reached up to her shoulder and disconnected the weapon, dropping it to the warehouse floor. With her mask gone, she had no way to track and fire it, so it was dead weight. Likewise, without her mask she had no chance of seeing any more drones that might be guarding the queen, so she headed for the only target she could see – the queen herself.
As she ran, she threw two, three of the stars at the huge creature, watching as they each impacted against her before spinning off into the darkness. She let her instincts guide her, sensing each star as it returned to her, catching it, then sending it aloft again. She was rewarded with seeing the queen rear up as the stars chipped away at the bony exoskeleton, a chunk of the wide frilled mane behind her head coming away and spurts of dark corrosive blood pushing out from her torso from glancing blows, the kainde amedha talons on the tip of each point of the stars penetrating the alien hide.
A plasma shot from the Elder, or perhaps it was her trainer, followed her stars in and scored a hit against her chest, and she could see a huge crater appear there. As she readied to throw the stars again, the queen turned to her, and charged. She kept the barrage of stars up until the last moment, then ran towards the queen. As they closed, she threw her legs out from under her, dropping onto her back with a bone jarring thud, and slid in the dust and dirt. The queen's grasping arms closed impotently in the air above her, and she clenched her fists, deploying the blades mounted to her forearms.
As their combined momentum carried them past each other, she slid between the queen's legs, and raised her hands, triggering the weapons under her forearms in a continuous burst of arrow tips into the belly of the queen at point blank range, the tips of her blades cutting deeply into her, the deadly blood spilling from the wounds she inflicted dripping harmlessly into the dust behind her, and then the weapons clicked empty, and they were past each other.
Not believing what she'd just done, she got to her feet quickly. The queen's bulk meant she took a few more steps before she was able to halt her own charge, but she was not completely without weapons to bring to bear. The queen's tail swung around and almost decapitated her, she ducked underneath it and felt the gale tug her braids from the near miss. She pulled the spear from its mounting and extended it, and as the tail reached the end of its swing, but before it could make another attack, she jumped for it, bringing the spear down, through the tail and into the floor of the warehouse itself, impaling it in place and trapping the queen.
She moved to get out of range but one of the long arms of the alien swung around and crushed into her back, throwing her dozens of feet across the warehouse until she slammed into a wall. Her head cracked against the wall, her braids softening the blow somewhat but she saw stars, then mercifully, she blacked out.
-
When she woke, it was to the face of the healer bent over her, clicking and growling worriedly. Without her mask, she didn't understand him completely, but she caught fragments of what he was saying to the other Yautja clustered around her.
"... know, it could be ... or she may not ..." She raised one hand weakly towards the healer.
"I'm OK, I think. I hurt a lot, but I'm alive." He cocked his head at her, and the Elder put one hand on his shoulder. He moved to one side, allowing the Elder to move closer, and the two of them lifted her to her feet. The motion made her head swim, and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out again, but she took hold of herself and through strength of will stayed conscious and upright.
She looked beyond them and saw the bulk of the queen lying on the ground, the spear still impaled through her tail and half of her huge head missing, a hot glow around the edges where it had been blasted. The body was already beginning to sink rapidly into the hole in the ground her blood was creating. The Elder took hold of her head and looked into her eyes, then turned away, satisfied she was conscious, before stepping towards the unblooded Yautja that had stood with her holding off the queen's guards. He had removed his mask already and stood there quietly, waiting as the others had made sure she was still alive.
The Elder reached down and unhooked something from his waist, and her eyes widened as she saw it was one of the long talons of the queen. The hunter stood proudly as the Elder clicked and growled something she couldn't understand, then raised the talon. The hunter held his ground as the Elder slowly drew the torn end of the talon across the hunter's mask, marking the italic stylized TT that he had placed on her own mask an eternity ago. The Elder then raised the talon to the hunter's forehead, and she watched as he stoically remained still while the Elder burned through his skin to place the mark there as well. He had been blooded.
She growled quietly in congratulations, but stopped when the Elder turned and came back to her, holding the talon out. He growled something she didn't understand, then hesitantly raised the talon towards her. She blinked and shook her head. The Elder growled a question at her, then realized she didn't have the translator and searched his loop recordings.
"You earned it." "Take it." He played. She tried to think of a way to explain again why it was an impossibility, when her trainer stepped up to stand with the Elder, and played his own loop recording to her.
"It's yours." "Cally." She shook her head.
"Yautja are blooded, but I'm not Yautja. And anyways, people would wonder why I have a weird looking burn mark on my forehead" she pointed out, her voice quavering. Her trainer growled a negative, reaching one hand towards her and stroking the side of her neck gently.
"It's yours." "Cally." he repeated, then "No-one will notice, I promise." She looked at him, tears welling up in her eyes and she tried to make sense of what was being said. He had said she would never be Yautja, but he was telling her to accept the mark of a blooded hunter. She looked at him as the tears began to trickle down her cheeks, stinging pain as the salt entered the grooves the kainde amedha's talons had made that ran from above one eyebrow, across the eye and down to her cheek. She shook her head mutely, and her trainer cocked his head. He growled something to the Elder, who inclined his head and passed the dripping black talon over.
He stepped forwards and raised the talon, and her eyes tracked its movement. She glanced around at the others and saw them standing there impassively, then back to him. With one hand, he disconnected his mask and removed it, and she looked into his deep set black eyes, then to the mark he wore on his own forehead. All her excuses went flying out of her mind, replaced by a single understanding – her trainer was saying she, a human, was worthy of being blooded.
With a quiet whimper, she gave in to the inevitable and she nodded, tilting her head to one side and bracing herself. He growled in approval and brought the talon to her neck, then fire ran across her skin as he imprinted the mark into her neck, branding her for life as a blooded hunter.
When he was done, he raised the talon high, examining the burn he had inflicted on her. It wasn't the same as the one on his head, or that he had given the Elder so long ago, which the Elder had just passed on to the hunter, although it drew strongly from that design - The same italicized TT but with a horizontal line, almost an underline below, and a line either side, creating a -TT-. He had taken his mark and added to it, creating a new one – hers, and hers alone.
The Yautja raised their heads and howled their congratulations to both the newly blooded hunters, but in her heart was only sorrow that Marisa, and Blade, weren't here to witness this moment. Her trainer had done the unthinkable, and blooded her, but she wondered if the cost to her personally might be too high. She wept inside, even as she joined in with a growl of pride.
