Not one of them had anticipated that some patrol would go down deck and forge ahead to the very back of it, exactly where they were.
Caught in such an underhanded place, Tigress acted initially upon the situation with delicate consideration. They had just finished adding poison in the water supply, and the evidence of their deed was littered all around them in the form of opened boxes and emptied, exploited potions. It did not take a detective to gain full cognizance of the situation.
The guard, an old and petite black panther, had reached for his baleful summoning horn hanging from his hips at the outset of his discovery, but he'd slowly flexed his fingers adjacent-wise to come into contact with the hilt of his knife instead. What came about this decision was an unnecessary standstill between just him, the tiger, and her bull companion.
Perhaps the panther simply enjoyed the feeling of toying with the warriors' temporized red-handedness. Tigress wasn't sure… Because, as if he didn't sense they were imposters already, what he had rather protracted was a game of questionnaires.
"And are you not aware that all men should be on deck?"
"Yes, we are aware." Tung answered. "So, under this command, you should find your way back up there little soldier boy."
His face darkened as he bowed away from the overhead torchlights. "Oh I'm afraid you cannot command me like that. I am after all, none other than the Boatswain. You answer me."
Tung raised a brow. "Well strike me pin-"
All of a sudden, the ship lobbed up sharply, plowing through a rough tide. Tung and Tigress were thrown aback several feet. Grasping outwards, the inexperienced duo immediately ensured vice-like grips on the poles of the surrounding stockholdings, which kept them from falling to the aft completely. Once the boat slammed back down, they were forced to their hands and knees.
The light fixtures were slowly moving in situ at every reductive swing, diminishing the vertigo of crossing lights. Tigress' many visions eventually merged into one pristine image, and she took that renewed focus to glare once more at where the panther may be. Surprisingly, he had remained at the exact same spot, his hands close to himself and completely unexpended.
The young tiger growled.
Enough of this. She knew she should've withdrawn the curtains to his playhouse act long before tensions could have fully come to head. For now there was no amount of verbal judo that could save them from the man's deductions—as he had already concluded things long before. If he simply wanted to taunt and play, then she might as well give him one hell of a rude awakening.
The guard continued. "Under which division are you guys in?"
"We- we don't know sir," Tung hesitated, pulling himself into a feeble stand. "we are new here."
"Under which sector?" The panther was adamant.
"I don't know. Two?"
"We do not call sectors here numerically my lackey. Now answer me once more."
He tried to make it brisk. "Five?"
"...That is still a number."
"I mean but-"
"Tung, enough." Tigress finally interjected, whispering. "Let's just get this guy already."
"Oh! She has spoken... She. Yes? She? Ha!" The panther oriented stiffly towards her, broaching with a pointed finger. "Have I been delusional? I must have been... I was very sure I've read a rule, and a very strict one at that, that does not permit women to join our workforce."
"Sorry. I guess I just missed the requisites entirely."
The tiger peered into the alleyway behind the panther. It seemed to have been irrevocably witness-less. And to stack the odds in her favor, the harsh stormy conditions outside certainly made this moment such a dire time of duty that not one more sailor would find the luxury to stumble down here.
The panther had spotted how her eyes seeked around, and he immediately sidestepped directly in the way of her fixations. "What were you doing to my men's water? Who sent you?"
Tung stepped in front of her.
"We did what we had to do. It was happy hour, and the men in ship needed a kick. That's just all." Now fully indifferent to the believability of his own alibis, the bull rambled thoughtlessly along, giving Tigress some time to get situated. "Also, for the record, my friend here is actually a fully grown male, but his voice is undeveloped. Very effeminate, but really nice if he sings. In fact if you-"
Irritated by his digression, the panther motioned for strict quietness, a hand in the air. "Not a word!"
"You don't want to hear him sing?"
"No." In a mechanical snap, a fan of daggers slipped into the guard's raised palm. He aimed it at their midriffs. " I don't plan to."
There was an indicative shling before the metal blades glided out of the panther's handheld contrivance.
In a tic of impulse, Tigress threw herself aside, bringing along her companion forcibly into the shelves that penned them. The knives passed the tiger in quick, white whizzes, only a hair's width away from welding completely with the skin of her breast armor.
She huffed.
"Damn!" Tung pushed himself off his silhouette-impacted hole. There wasn't much due thought then—reclining his horns into view, he leaped with a sort of coiled force and charged recklessly towards their adversary.
The panther quelled the impact by twisting around Tung's unstoppable form. Quickly unfettering himself from the bovine's sustained momentum, the dark feline allowed the heavy cargo behind him to deal the final blow on his hurtling combatant.
In for a consecutive strike, Tigress prowled, arms driving out cross-wise. Her smaller opponent had turned just in time, parrying the initial assaults with delayed and unmatched intensity. The bruteness of her sheer, continuous pounding collapsed his hands within seconds, rendering him into a defenseless, cross-armed brace. Constituents of armor began exploding from him. Every one of the tiger's upper handed punches dealt an anvil-like blow.
Desperate, the panther bent in for his knife before blindly driving the blade diagonally from his waistline to as far out as he could. Tigress limboed away from the strike quick; with his chest now defensively opened, she swiftly wrapped her arms around his torso and bucked him overhead, executing a nearly conclusive slam-down.
But just before the tiger could turn around and restrain her defeated opponent, the ship gave out the loudest, most nauseating creak—in a blink, she was completely off of him.
The Junk had just upended in a nearly free-fall angle.
Tigress gave out a pained growl. Her nails were unsheathed, slowly being abraded away at every meter of floorboard she was sliding across. Boxes had begun falling free from their harnesses, raining down upon her like fatal rain. All while fighting the immense downward pull of gravity, she dodged the debris. Every overtaxed sinew in her required an entire battle of will to unstiffen and move.
Tung zipped uncontrollably past Tigress; by the time she glanced behind, he was already flat against the hill of loose cargo that had piled up on the distant aft. In her last exertion of initiative, the feline kicked aside the remaining falling box from marking its landing right on the bull's chest.
"Thanks!" Tung yelled.
The tiger couldn't afford a response. Her fixations led her to face back ahead where the primal opponent remained. She put all force into her breaks, finally stopping.
There was an ease in the storms. The tempestuous tidal smacks that girdled the ship faded just a bit, and the junk finally fell from its perpendicularity. But the vessel was still cradled in turbulent arms. The ground before the tiger remained in no stable axis—she felt every commoving tilt work against her muscles.
"Isn't it utterly convenient that the storm is on full swing this good evening?" From afar, the panther propped himself up the shelves. A triumphant smile broadened his face despite the obvious battery it suffered.
While reserved and muted towards the insult, Tigress' procession towards the man became markedly more aggressive, her steps turning into a steadying stomps.
"I see how it is." The panther only had to shuffle backwards to keep the distance between them the same. He patted down his body, seeking his distress horn—eventually he learned it was knocked out of him. Annoyed, he probed her even further. "Again, Who is it, the man you work for? You give the name and I'll deliver the story myself. This funny little situation of yours—I'm sure it'll amuse him more than it would disappoint."
As real as the situation was, the tiger couldn't help but allow all her thoughts to instantly go back to her master. There was a moment in the past she recounted about the training hall's tortoise shell. The very first time she ever set foot on that thing was several years ago, when Shifu was out on a mission. Her initial confidence took her nowhere; at the first second she stepped on the rim, she lost her balance. When she slipped inside, the curve of the bowl launched her out into the neighboring gator gauntlets.
The second time she interacted with it was a day after she found the five, when Shifu finally invited her into the more perilous parts of the training hall. Those two measly instances of training could not lighten her feet, not a gram, for this current situation. She felt like a toddler on crutches.
Somehow, her untimely pensiveness had quickened the tiger's pace as her limbs gradually calmed from its destructive efforts. She no longer fought the rough, dream-like physics of this seafaring world—instead, she had begun drifting through it.
Committed to his blinding haughtiness, the panther picked up a piece of his armor sliding by his feet and inspected it all across. He puckered his lips at the image of his own reflection. "Someone will check the deck for wreckage any time now. At that point you'd have proudly moved an inch."
We'll see about that! Forgoing her surefire approach, Tigress made a faithful leap and covered the final distance, gliding like a hawk.
The guard looked up upon hearing the abrupt change in movement—only then did he finally discern the tiger's actual proximity. At full tilt he fled backwards, but by then he began too late.
Tigress took their battle to the ground. The movement in their consequent infighting assumed a circular motion as each cat tried to overtop one another. She eventually won this uniquely feline grappling, mounting over the panther.
"Don't play tag with your enemies. They'll catch you with a knife." Sending down her fist, the tiger ended his world at once.
Mantis felt an eerie anxiety as the bull watched him scuttle to their vicinage. He was impelled to break the silence. "It's getting ridiculously wet outside! Especially for me, since one teardrop's a soak. Also who's the poor dead guy?"
"He's the second mate of the first mate, or something. He straight up caught us, so you know what we had to do." Tung muttered. "Of course he would've been a dead man if your gentlefriend here isn't so insistent on keeping him alive. Now she's punching breathing holes in the box he's in."
Mantis looked behind Tung and caught Tigress just before she could bring down a knife to the lid of the crate. Flustered, the tiger quickly stepped away from her current task, withdrawing the blade back into her covers.
The bull groaned, pinching his snout. "Anyways, we've created a new problem. Once he wakes... No amount of gags stuffed down his throat could stop his screeches from making an announcement across the entire South China Sea."
"Hah!" The bug perked. For once in this entire mission, he finally had some medical calling. "Then it's a good thing you have me now! Take his helmet off. I need to see his neck."
Tung kicked away the headgear, allowing Mantis to creep up the panther's totaled face. He stopped thoughtfully between the guard's half opened, heavy lidded eyes; he took the liberty of stomping each of them shut completely. A diagnosis grew on him, and a smile crept up his face. "I'm gonna lock his chi."
Tigress approached swiftly. "How do you know how to do that?"
"I was an acupuncturist! I thought you knew... You did step on my needles." Stepping down, he single-handedly flipped the panther. "Four of them-that's how many you stepped on. They were dented, but I still had to use them on my client afterwards..."
The bug's voice faded off privately. "Oohhh… That's probably why Shifu was all messed up."
The tiger shook her head.
Mantis summited the panther once more, trailing along the path of his spine.
"Well, anyways, this should be fairly possible. He already knocked himself out, and that's the first and hardest step! Only thing we need to do is to keep him in that state." Mantis patted a foot on his intended locus. "This right here! Me and my medic colleagues used to call this the d-spot. D as in for dead! Sorry, sorry that was little much. But watch this."
From an over the top leap, he plummeted down with his limbs jutted out and hit the localized spot. The panther began flailing and spinning, registering the chi imbalance immediately.
All three spectators stepped from the messy site. Mantis— closely regardful of all the destructive acrobatics the panther was currently performing— became more amused than he was concerned. His feline victim eventually wilted into a weak and fetal-like position.
"Ta and da! That's what I call a medically assistive roundhouse kick!"
Tigress put a hand over her mouth, aghast. "Was he... really supposed to do all, that?"
"Ehhh. No… actually..." The bug implied carefully. " I may have hit the wrong-ish nerve—I think. And that may have caused those minor extra steps with the spasming and convulsing. I'm guessing I missed 'the d-spot' by an inch. So… oops.
The tiger nudged the guard with a toe and felt nothing but dead-flesh. When she turned him over, she had come to barely recognize the panther by his aggressively slacked and petrified features; his tongue was out and his eyes were lifeless. "At this point, you'd still be proud if you accidentally killed him."
"Hey. It was an honest mistake. But we ended up with the same result, right? He's sleeping like a baby." The insect caressed the downed feline's cheek. "C'mon Tigress, find the guts and hold the puke… Now, help out and imprison this offender!"
Tying, gagging and caging the panther was all in a second's work. The bull sealed the lid into a jammed shut and booted the box out into the rear of the ship.
"So, the news?" Tung finally prompted as he turned.
Mantis gestured that they formed a tighter circle. "Looks like we're gonna have to wait a while. I overheard someone, the quarter master I'm thinking... something about rationing out the next set of aliments after the storm's fully gone."
Speaking of the weather must have summoned its fury. The floor plunged beneath them, making them airborne for too many seconds. Out of reflex, they grabbed for the nearest handholds, waiting out the heavy turbulence.
A sudden cascade of water leaked from the ceiling and onto Tung. He swatted the liquid off his head, enraged. "Why are we fringing the Guàiwù's Tempest anyways. I've overheard a few days back in port about this storm. This thing's supposed to be miles away from the mainland. We're not supposed to be this far out."
All eyes were turned on Mantis for the answer. He must've known something after creeping around the master's cabin for so long.
"If I had a clue, I'd impart it." Mantis said.
The bull snatched the bug. "So you know nothing? What have you been doing?"
The bug pursed his mouth. Tigress' and Tung's uncertain frowns had grown more dismal, hammering down on him an intense blame that can only be matched by two disappointed parents. "Listen, it was hard to know stuff in there. The old guys barely talked and if they did, they spoke in tongues. But, hey. Let's not worry about that right now, okay? We'll just stick to the plan, I'm pretty sure this whole detour shenanigans is not gonna get in the way too much."
"Yeah right." Tigress murmured as the bug was being set down. She let her head hang low.
"Hey. Hey. Tigress." Mantis snapped his claw-fingers to quickly out her from her negative tangent. "At the end of the day, we're still gonna make these bad guys hit the hay. This problem?—it's simply… the storm before the calm. We just do what we have to do. They won't even know what hit 'em. Because nothing really will hit them. Except the poison! Right? Hehe…" The insect anticipated for a response, but he received silent impassiveness. He took slight offense to it. "C'mon! Vibe with me! Ughh. Next time I'm only gonna do this with Monkey."
"You do that." Tigress spoke. "In the meantime, we should start going back up."
Screeching, deadly noise. Hours upon hours of enduring it.
Crane flipped the other way, allowing one suffered ear to rest while the other took its place in hearing out the fatal pitch of grating metal. An outburst from him was surely imminent. He could temper his good-heart and keep his rage at bay. Patience wasn't just waiting - it was waiting with a good attitude, they always said. Perhaps, he could achieve this realization by means of meditation.
Crane brought himself together into an awkward lotus pose, careful that his wings remained secured to his ears. With a trembling inhale, the bird commenced his breathing exercises.
His meditation eventually became less and less deliberate. And as it did, the antagonistic noise from all over decrescendoed to the point where only a subtle screeching remained with him, like a stringed accompaniment on his shoulder that drew its bow on rusted cords. The more he tried to get rid of this lasting effect, the more it became just as annoying as how the sound was in its entirety.
This is so stupid!
The jarring noise that he longed to forget amplified afresh. He could sense the heat of his garnered concentration snuff out, whisking away into the miserable abyss. Surrendering all together, the bird limped from his trained and rigid form. "Ju Lung, you're not gonna be able to saw your way across that iron bar with your stupid claws."
The bear blew away some dust from his meticulous progress of knicking. "You got any better ideas kid?"
"No."
"And that's what I thought."
He didn't like how unaware the bear was towards his own stupidity. "Well what you're doing is no better than no idea. It probably isn't even an idea at all. An idea requires thinking. Obviously you put no thought onto that-"
"Oh why don't you bend over and start stomping on your own filthy little head." Ju Lung stood, reaching out from the cell and taking a torch affixed to the far wall. He fell back down and settled the hottest innards of the small flame right onto the barely damaged spot.
"What are you trying to achieve now…"
"I'm just thinking, what if the heat softens up the metal?"
Crane hitched a breath before he could begin to speak. Wrangling with the inept bear again simply wasn't worth it.
The antechamber door burst open, and two large bovines marched inside.
"Alright folks. Good news, one of you's gonna get reincarnated soon!" The yak signaled for his younger comrade. "Xiaozi, get a cuff."
The bull searched all around. "Where do you guys put them?"
"It's by the door!" He exploded, pointing viciously. "Next time look with your eyes, not with your mouth. Can't you see the whole stash? They're literally glimmering."
"Alright. Sheesh." Xiaozi went to retrieve them.
The older bovine waltzed to the far cage, jostling its bars. "Good Morning Red! Are you in there? You better be! Your early routine's gonna be changing up a bit. We're putting your head on a spike."
Crane pressed his eyes through the gridded holes of his own cell, all the more concerned. The silent vacancy of the dungeon during the night had given the false impression that it was only him and Ju Lung that were left.
From the dark cage, a fox revealed himself into the dim sphere of light. "You may be smiling now Li Hua, but ohhhh. Watch this all turn against you - you son of a bitch."
"Oh shut up! You're too funny, I'm laughing." The yak poked a finger on the mutt's forehead, almost pushing him over.
Despite looking all forms of cage-stricken, the fox recomposed himself back into a sort of regal, well-marshalled pose.
"Hey!" The adjacent cage was rattled suddenly by frail hands, gathering everyone's attention. "Don't do it— don't you even dare. Not to my boy you-"
"Oh stop the act! You seen it everyday! Your boy's been useless. And we don't feed and shelter useless people. Now shut it in there." Ling Hua rapped back on the diminutive prisoner's cell in a much greater show of comparative force.
The young bull returned, setting down cuffs before the condemned fox. "Lord Huolu, I'm going to need your hands and feet to face me."
The small canine only glimpsed at him momentarily before complying in silence.
Ju Lung muttered, closing in on Crane's for better vantage. "Absolutely no resistance. Seems like this guy actually wants to be killed."
The bird fell away from the space they were suddenlt sharing, and from where he landed, a prickly thing stabbed his butt. He pulled out a stick.
A disgruntled yell, "Damn!"
The sound of plying struggles took the bird's attention back to the current situation.
"What is it now?" The old yak grunted.
"His paws are a bit small. I can't strap the cuffs on right." He pulled the binding away from the fox's conceded limbs. "Are there, maybe, other sizes?"
"Yeah. All the way to the east wing where the rest of the armaments are. You want to walk way back there?"
"If I have to-"
"Oh come on!" The older guard snatched the cuffs and threw it back on the floor for his subordinate to work over once more. "I'm supposed to get off soon for my daughter's party. And we have two more people to send off. Get going!"
Crane and Ju Lung gaped at each other, assessing whether they have both come to the same feared conclusion. It was them—the ones being referred to.
A chill ran down the bird's spine.
The younger bovine had been silent and unmoved. "I'll try to tighten the cuffs some more, but if it doesn't, I'm not breaking protocol."
"The protocol you just learned yesterday? Let me tell you something. I've been in this game for two years. You're not about to take time off my day because you're too pussy to handle a tiny fox. You either break the protocol or I break you."
Ling Hua's passionate chain of berating was cut short by a resounding click; Xiaoxi tugged on the bonds, checking the successful fastening. "Yep. Got it."
Crane turned back around, deep in thought. The circumstances that had just occurred allowed a wave of predictions, and a plan was quickly forming in the bird's head—although he admittedly knew this scheme was more dependent on an odds-on series of events than it is, by its own, adaptable to a broad set of conditions. Luck was almost never on his side.
But despite this, the bird leaned over to his carnivoran peer to break the plan down quickly for him.
I would like to extend gratitude to The Dragon Chronicle for beta reading!
