"I'm too young to die!"
- D. Va
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEYY!"
- Akane Higurashi
"AAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!"
- Kamina
"Bimba dagli occhi pieni di malìa…"
"AAAAUUGGH! AAAGGGHH! AAAAAHHHH!"
- The Goonies
The first step in creating an immortal fox spirit was to kill the cumbersome body that imprisoned the girl's soul. Mercy the Unmerciful cackled deliriously as she plunged the sharpened base of her wooden staff down through the bright pink MEKA canopy and felt the gnarled plank sink into a small beating heart. The witch closed her eyes and hummed in accomplishment. D. Va's agonized shriek broadcasting over a military intercom was like a wondrous midnight sonata ringing in Mercy's ears.
The witch began reciting forbidden verses as she twisted her staff in a harsh circular motion and stirred the dying ingredients inside the collapsed pink cauldron. The pilot's screams rose louder and louder out of the MEKA's breached canopy as the winged sorceress uttered her magic hexes in deeper and deeper tones. Her voice became more dissonant and sinister as her tongue danced through the exotic syllables. The special treat she had planned for tonight was to turn this doomed rabbit stew into something a little more freaky.
But then that sweet sonata turned into an endless cacophony.
To put it bluntly, Mercy was getting annoyed. She was expecting this would all be over in one tragic but straightforward stab. But D. Va somehow managed to hang in there for an extra minute despite her central vascular system being impaled with dozens of wooden splinters and having no chance of survival. And boy, was she a noisy fighter.
"Good gracious. I didn't think you were going to be this stubborn about dying." Mercy shook her head in disbelief to all the screaming. But she persisted in her merciless task, and she gradually felt the struggling weaken underneath her staff as D. Va was driven toward the end of her mortality. The witch yanked the gnarled pole backwards in a lever motion, and the downed MEKA finally became completely silent after its pilot squeaked out a final death grunt.
Mercy swiftly lifted her staff out of the breached armor and tapped its base against the MEKA's roof to dry off most of the arterial blood. She sprinkled the motionless vehicle with some mysterious dust stored in a burlap pouch on her hip (which was probably just a handful of conventional gunpowder). Her metal shoulder wings flapped once, and she vaulted off of the MEKA with weightless grace.
The wreckage exploded into a violent funeral pyre behind her, lighting up the night air with roaring orange flames and bright blue ignited plasma. Mercy never even glanced over her shoulder to watch her destructive efforts pay off, because this was a savage world where witches in wide-brimmed hats didn't look at explosions. The fireworks were Step 2 in raising the spirit of a new kumiho.
All of Mercy's hard work was finished. Now it was time for the festivities.
The witch turned around to face the fire once it was steadily burning. Her eyes focused on something unnatural stirring inside of the flames. The air echoed with the words she'd been chanting a minute earlier as a dark, dainty silhouette climbed out of the fire and crawled over the charred roof of the MEKA. The fire died gently down despite having an abundant fuel source that should have allowed it to continue burning. White smoke billowed off of the silhouette's hair and lower back as she twitched her head.
A lone shin-ryeong wearing D. Va's faded visage stretched over the MEKA's blackened remains on all fours as the smoke solidified into her ears and tails. She was dressed in a tattered but elegant white death shroud common for her kind. She shook her long white hair behind her shoulders and lightly sniffed the air. Picking up a curious scent, she stared down at the witch-summoner with pulsating white eyes.
"What's up, necrobitch?" D. Va's pale dry lips twisted into a smirk showing her sharpened canines.
Mercy was slightly taken aback. She wasn't exactly sure how a freshly reincarnated kumiho was going to act, but she was expecting something more along the lines of "How do you command me, Unholy Mistress?"
The fox-demon's left ear impatiently flicked to the side of her head.
"Well, you yanked me up from the gates of Hell with an offering of life, blood, and… whatever that stretchy blue and white thing I was wearing was supposed to be. Now I guess I'm your pet bound by contract until you tell me I'm free to go. What made you go through all the trouble of waking up little old Gyeoulhaechung?"
The demon's name meant "Winter Vermin."
Mercy shook off her surprise and started to scratch her chin.
"I haven't really thought that part out, to be honest. I was mainly just interested to see if the curse would actually work."
The paranormal entity formerly known as D. Va rolled her icy glowing eyes.
"You turned me into roadkill for the rest of eternity and you don't even know why. And the myths say I'm supposed to be the one with the brainrot."
Mercy shrugged and glanced up at the fox spirit with a wry motherly smile. "You can be my undead legion, I suppose. Go do undead legion things for me."
The renegade fox-demon stretched over the burnt out wreckage on her shrouded belly and crossed her arms under her chin, playfully kicking the smoking air behind her.
"A regular spook 'em and shoot 'em. Got it, boss." D. Va twitched her pointed white ears and winked playfully.
The crafty demoness didn't need any extra help to Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo her destroyed MEKA into a more useful form. She had plenty of her own mischievous shapeshifting powers to do that herself.
Threads of dark magic trickled out of her curled white nails and swarmed through the scorched panels of her MEKA. Broken scrap metal rattled and folded over itself as the machine was reassembled into a more macabre form. Damaged armor healed into solid black stone. Frayed and melted electrical wiring spread apart into cobwebs. Fully transformed, the vehicle looked less like a bipedal jet and more like an ancient Korean hanok decorated with burning wax candles and terra cotta roof tiles.
D. Va stretched back on her belly when she done playing arcane mechanic. She cupped her clawed hands against the whisker face paint on her cheeks and proudly smirked.
"Try not to get any of your tails caught in your turbines, foxy dear." Mercy studied D. Va's mystical contraption with intrigue.
"Try not get any bones stuck in your boobs, Skeleton Nanny," D. Va snorted back at her with a nasally voice trying to mock the witch's tone. "I can phase through anything I want like it's not even there. You're just a fleshbag with a short shelf life."
Mercy found this shin-ryeong to be a funny little creature. Dead as a doornail, but just as snarky and vivacious as ever. This was going to be an entertaining alliance.
Just to demonstrate that phasing thing she was talking about, D. Va descended like a cloud of white fog through the MEKA's stone hull and came to rest inside its coffin-shaped cockpit. All systems came online with a combination of whirring digital computers and stock creepy mansion sound effects.
"Later, boogeylady," the spectral pilot's voice crackled over the MEKA's intercom as it waved its cannon at Mercy. The candles covering its ancient stone limbs flickered yellow in timing with her voice.
D. Va turned and hopped out of the blackened bonfire crater that marked the site of her own death. Her thrusters screamed through the sky in a high-pitched banshee wail as she faded into a faraway speck miles away.
The witch tracked her conjured beast in the air with devious narrowed eyes. Her blood red lips curled into an odd nurturing smile while she whispered to herself.
"Such a delightfully grave girl. She always did insist there was no undertaking she couldn't succeed in."
Author's note: I wonder if any Overwatch characters know what Viper is.
