By the third apocalyptic ringing sound adults have started to arrive, running to their children from all over the village. Kids rush to parents, parents rush to kids, and suddenly I'm surrounded. Once the kids are mostly taken care of by their parents, I wade through the crowd looking for the people who know what the hell is going on.

I find the Ali'i and several more of the older clan members and, again since they were talking in English, slide myself into a place where I can listen in.

"There appear to be five of them." One of the villagers reports to the Ali'i.

"And you're sure they're from Kauai?" The Ali'i asks, not sounding like he has much hope.

"I don't know where else you'd find dragon mo'o." I've gotten quite the crash course on Hawaiian mythology staying here for the majority of the last few years. 'Mo'o' technically means 'dragon' or anything overly lizard like that isn't mundane. It has come to refer to all Hawaiian shapeshifters though, and they come in far more flavors than just 'dragon'. Old Hawaiian has a lot of words for different kinds of water, and each has their own mo'o. The dragons are only found on Kauai, and are associated with sea caves. They're also all black widows. Every Kauaian dragon is, in human form, a beautiful woman. They also tended to eat men after sleeping with them. Which they do as often as they can get away with. Perhaps more important to our current situation is the very long enmity between Kauai and the Big Island. All attempts to unify the islands started on the Big Island, and Kauai is the only island they'd never conquered. Not for a lack of trying though. This results in a not insignificant amount of hate between traditionalists and the longer lived beings on both islands.

Something about mo'o keeps bugging me, though what it is I can't put my finger on. Something about different kinds of mo'o? There are turtle mo'o in lagoons, really creepy kind of spidery ones in the lava tunnels, deep water has squid like ones with way too many arms, and sh... Shark mo'o associated with crashing waves. "Shit." I murmure to myself as several things suddenly line up.

"Ericka?" I jerk my head up to find the Ali'i and all the elders looking at me, "Something to add?" The Ali'i asks.

"Uh... just that Pua has been talking about problems with sharks over the last few weeks." I tell the leader of the village feeling more than a little nervous. I've never talked to him directly before, even though he's been responsible for a lot of my good fortune with the village, "I remember that I heard her talking about having spoken to a... Ka... Ka... Kamohoali'i, that's it, about them and him saying that the sharks aren't his. Both Pua and Ku took off this morning for some meeting, which I'll bet has something to do with sharks, and the moment they're gone we get hit by Kauaian Mo'o? They were deliberately lured out of the village, and out of the way."

The Ali'i nods slowly, "This is good news, if the Kauaians are unwilling to attack us while Pua and Ku are still here that means that the dragons don't believe they could pull this off with them here. That means we only need to buy time until they can return."

"We could hide in the training grounds but..." The elder speaking glances at me and the children, "The protections there will keep out anybody not known to them, and without the Kahuna to adjust them neither the children nor our guest will be able to enter."

Lua is the traditional martial art of Hawaii, each clan, village, or family has their own unique style of it, which is a closely guarded secret. The place it's taught is hidden and the art is only practiced at night to make things harder on any spies. Even though I'm treated like one of the village by most of the people here, I'm not, so can't know anything about the Ke'Kua'Okolani Lua. Apparently, in order to help keep everything a secret, Pua has done something that would keep out the children too young to learn, as well as outsiders.

"I will keep the children safe." Everybody pauses to look at where Vivain has been watching the goings on silently, "I will protect no others, but the young ones I will keep safe."

The Ali'i studys the Lady of the Lake then, to my shock, glances at me. I can't imagine what he wants. Normally it would be the job of the Kahuna to advise the Ali'i on supernatural dealings, but Pua isn't here. So why... it hits me like a lightning bolt. I'm the most supernaturally knowledgeable person here at the moment, and I'm being taught by their Kahuna and chief warrior. Almost their apprentice if we're being generous, and the Ali'i is treating me like I am.

I swallow hard. Fae love children, it's the reason why changelings like Cait exist, because they can't stand by and watch a child suffer. So the idea of a powerful Fae like the Lady of the Lake volunteering to keep a bunch of kids safe isn't that unreasonable. I nod to the Ali'i, and he nods back at me.

Wha...?

Oh.

Right.

Only the Kahuna talks to greater powers to avoid anybody else saying something unexpectedly dumb. Like thanking a fae which would be most humans' first impulse.

So how do I... got it.

"The Ke'Kua'Okolani will remember your generosity." I say with a bow. There, I acknowledged that she's doing us a favor, and simultaneously saying that there's no debt as she volunteered. This act is a gift, one that would be remembered but requires no response from the village.

Vivain bows shallowly to me, and slightly deeper to the Ali'i, before turning and getting the adults with kids to help shepherd the children off. Given the direction they're headed in, Vivain probably plans on keeping the kids in the forge she set up next to the fish pond.

I turn back to the Ali'i and the elders, "The rest of you should hide in the training grounds." I tell them.

The Ali'i raises a single bushy white eyebrow, "And what will you do?"

I... I'm not really sure. I can probably hide pretty successfully on my own. Set up my pressure Script and use that to fuel my invisibility indefinitely since with the Script, taking in energy takes no focus on my part. If I set up somewhere out of the way they'll never find me.

But that idea doesn't really sit well with me. I'd drive myself nuts in minutes, and then probably do something stupid.

So instead I'll skip the middle steps, and jump straight to doing something stupid? That does sound more like me. Besides, I glance up at where the wards around the village are now constantly visible from the strain.

"I'll try to slow the invaders down." I tell him turning back to the group, "If they can find and break down the protections around the village, they can probably do the same to the wards around the training grounds given enough time. No idea how much time that is, but I can insure that they'll have less than they want."

The Ali'i studies me carefully for a long moment, then nods, "We go to the training grounds." He shouts over the din of the gathered villagers. They immediately quiet, "Take nothing. Go quickly, and do not tarry." He turns back to me then, "Laki maikaʻi, Koa." Good luck, Warrior.

###

I make a brief stop by my room in Pua's house for a knife. I almost take the last knife that hasn't been tested yet, but I remember how much I've been screwed over by the malfunctioning knife I'd used on the vampires. So instead I take the one I used on the Sirens, the one I know works as intended.

More or less.

Thus armed I head for where my new targets are pounding their way through Pua's wards. It isn't hard to find, I just head to where the noise is the loudest. Next to the barrier the sound of the wards being struck is literally deafening. If not for my regeneration I'd be looking at some serious hearing loss.

The edge of the village is marked by a line of trees that hold Pua's growing spells tied to living trees. When I arrive I can see the trunks of several of those trees beginning to crack and splinter from the repeated impacts on the spells tied to their lives. They'll break in moments and then I'll be out in the open staring down five dragons, whatever their current shape.

That sounds like a terrible place to be, so I sprint for the nearest house. Like most houses in the village it's a two story plantation style building with a red tea plant at each of it's four corners. The front door isn't locked, honestly locks were so infrequently used in the village I wonder why the doors still have them, so I let myself in.

As quickly and quietly as I can, I sprinted up the stairs. Halfway up the steps I hear the sound of several tree trunks exploding like popping popcorn. I slow down immediately, having no idea how good a dragon mo'o's senses are.

Carefully I creep up to a window on the second floor that overlooks where the mo'o have been assaulting the wards. Outside the line of trees that mark the edge of the village is the black rock and sand of a young volcanic island. The tree's mark a hard line where the blasted wasteland suddenly becomes a green paradise. Three of the border trees have exploded. Splinters of wood lay everywhere, and their leafy crowns have dropped forming an odd break in the otherwise solid barrier.

Just inside of the tree line stand five women. They all look remarkably similar, like they could be sisters. There's little variation in height, all of them being near to six foot. They all have the same darkly tanned skin, the same long dark hair done up in the same warriors knot. They all ware the same coconut fiber cloth skirts and bark cloth chest wraps. They carry the same wooden knives edged in sharks teeth hanging from their wrists, and the same long cord with a cloth sack holding a single fist sized stone tied to the end, wrapped around their waists like a belt. Their tattoos are different but I honestly don't care enough to use those as identifiers, and one of them wore a red cape.

The one in the cape seema to be the one in charge, as I watch she starts barking out orders in old hawaiian, which I unfortunately don't know enough of to really understand what they're saying. It becomes clear pretty quickly though, the five split up and spread through the village. Searching for villagers I assume. Hopefully all the adults have gotten out to wherever the training grounds are. I'm not really too worried about the kids. If these people want to pick a fight with the Lady of the Lake that's their prerogative.

For now though I need to get to work. As soon as they start moving away I scramble out of the window and onto the roof of the house. I'm hoping that mo'o are as unlikely to look up as humans are. The houses are fairly well scattered, but I think that with my new strength I'll be able to make the distance between at least the closer ones.

Picking out one of the mo'o to follow I get a running start and fling myself into the air. I flicker my invisibility, I'm not here, when I take off and again, I'm not here, when I land rendering both actions silent. Or at least unnoticed by my target. I'm not following the one with the cape, but other than that I still really can't tell them apart.

I follow along behind my target as she starts to, apparently, do a lap around the outside of the village. Every so often she'll stop, tilt her head back and sniff the air. I always vanish, I'm not here, whenever this happens to make sure she won't catch an active close by scent.

Otherwise the next five minutes are very uneventful as I wait for the mo'o women to get far enough apart that they won't be guaranteed to hear me attacking one of them. Finally though, I judged enough time had passed for sufficient distance to be acquired.

All I'm waiting for now is for my target to stop and sniff the air again. As I wait I consider. Is there anything they have that I want? I don't know a lot about what powers dragon mo'o are supposed to have, so I can't really think of anything, besides the obvious, off the top of my head. I know they're shapeshifters, and that they can breath underwater.

That's about it.

Being able to turn into a dragon does sound pretty cool though. I wonder if I'll turn into the same kind of dragon they do, or if my shape will be influenced by my very different ethnic background and what I've done to myself. Either way I'm looking forward to finding out.

Finally the mo'o I've been following stops to sniff the air again. Which is good. Between being invisible whenever I jump, or land, and whenever she scents the air, and whenever I feel more nervous than normal about being discovered, I'm beginning to run a little dry.

Even so I vanish again, I'm not here, and launch myself off my current roof. I plummet through the air undetected until I land on the shapeshifter knife first. The blade crunches through the woman's currently human skull without issue, and the both of us hit the ground. Her face down, and myself kneeling over her body.

I frown confused as I don't feel the rush of my gaining the power to turn into a dragon, or anything else rushing into me. That's...

HOLY SHIT!

I jerk backwards as a tiny dragon the size of my hand erupts out of the woman's back like a fucking chestburster! It's growing rapidly enough that by the time it has pulled its way half out of the human body and sank its teeth into my wrist, which took only moments, it's as long as my arm.

I grit my teeth against the scream of pain that wants to escape them. Fortunately it grabbed my left wrist, leaving my knife hand unimpaired. Using it's grip on my arm I yank the still growing dragon out of the chest cavity it emerged from, and managed to slam the snaky lizard into the ground hard enough to jar it.

Reminding myself that I'll heal, I pin the top of its head to the ground by leaning on where it's biting me. Driving it's teeth deeper into my flesh and tearing at the edges of the wounds. My knee pins it's back end to the ground just above its hind legs, and without a moment's hesitation I drive the knife into the smaller scales just under its jaw. The thing spasms once, twice. Then lies still.

For a long moment I'm cautious, as I still haven't felt the knife activate, but then I realize that I hadn't been focusing on anything. Glancing back at the human corpse that's now boiling away into a rapidly dispersing vapor, I decide that I've dodged a bullet.

If chest bursting is how they shape shift, I want none of it.

On the other hand, I'm still low on mana. Note to self, on the final version of the knife make sure that it'll steal life energy for me if I don't tell it to do anything else.

Still that's one down, four more to go.

###

I feel more than a little hollow, the feeling that tells me I'm just about out of mana, so I'm not willing to go roof to roof again. Without my fae glamor to render that method of travel silent, I'm unwilling to risk it. Moving on the ground feels less safe, but it's much easier to do quietly.

It also means I almost get caught when I find my second target. This one is searching house to house. Probably making sure that there's nobody hiding in an attic or something. I'm running as quietly as I can when she comes out of a house a door down from where I am. If she looks in my direction I'm screwed, but she's looking the other way for the moment. That gives me just enough time to slide under the house I'm next to, taking advantage of standard Hawaiian construction lifting the base of the house a couple of feet or so off the ground to deal with the inevitable flooding.

I'm so glad that Pua's wards keep dangerous animals like poisonous spiders out of the village. I'm from California, I'm more than familiar with the preferred habitats of both Brown Recluse and Black Widow spiders. I'd have definitely pissed off at least a couple of widows with my desperate slide under the house, if any had been here.

I carefully move to the edge of the house and peer through the vegetation planted all along the edge of the house, to watch the mo'o. She's looking in the direction of my slide, causing me to hold my breath. She moves with determination in my direction, I grip my knife with a sweating hand. I'm not really sure if I can take a dragon, even in human form, in a straight fight. Straight fights are absolutely off the agenda for this afternoon.

She pauses, almost right in front of me, and bends down to peer under the house. I'm not here, I'm not here, I think frantically, feeling the hollow empty feeling increasing rapidly. Her gaze sweeps the underside of the house several times. She scents the air wrinkling her nose at whatever she smells. After far too long she stands looking around again, and I let my invisibility fall again. I'm trembling slightly and sweating from the exertion.

The mo'o woman turns a circle in the road in front of my hiding place. Scenting the air again and trying to find something. I can't bring myself to activate my glamor again, so I'm unsurprised when she spins to look at the house, smelling the air again. She moves towards the house with a determined stride almost sending me into a panic that I'm about to be discovered.

I nearly sigh with relief when the mo'o heads up the front steps and into the house. I can hear her moving around through the floor until her footsteps fade around the middle of the house. I assume because she headed up stairs to search there.

I take a moment to think then. I can probably take her by surprise when she leaves the house, if I'm careful and lucky. Should I try to take something from this one? Last time it didn't work because, apparently, a head shot isn't lethal to these things. It only died once I killed the dragon body. If the dragon body doesn't spontaneously generate then there's a tiny dragon curled up in each of these women's chest cavity somewhere. I'm betting near the heart, because that's just how these things work. Maybe I can bring them down quicker by killing both bodies at once?

So, a stab to the heart like I'm killing a vampire, instead of to the head or throat. And if I'm wrong? I kill the dragon separately, again.

Still, stealing something. I don't want chestburster shape shifting, that leaves water breathing. I could go for it, but I can't quite shake the feeling of the near miss when I discovered how my brand new dragon shape would have manifested.

New rule, no stealing anything until I know how it'll manifest in me. For all I know I'll end up with a really obvious set of gills that I'll never be able to get rid of. That would make blending in rather difficult, not to mention I just started feeling attractive, and don't want to stop so soon. So no stealing traits from mo'o for now. I'm still running on fumes, so this target can at least give me some mana to work with.

I keep listening for the mo'o, and finally hear it coming back down the stairs. It moves around the bottom floor for a little while longer, then heads back to where it had entered the house. It exits the front door again and stands on the path looking around. I kind of wonder what she's thinking about, but not enough to slow me down.

I gather the last dregs of mana I have, and creep out from under the house, I'm not here, and move up behind her. The Kauaian dragon is none the wiser as I take a moment to psych myself up, and focus on her mana. Then in one motion I wrap an arm around her throat, pulling her backwards, and drive my knife forward between her ribs. I try to catch a lung at the same time to keep her from crying out, while at the same time getting the little dragon I suspect is curled up in her chest cavity.

I must have gotten a lung, as all she lets out is a gasping wheeze, but there's no rush from the knife activating. So I stab her a few more times rapidly, trying to shred everything in her chest without ever fully removing the knife from her body, just changing my angle. On the fourth stab I finally get what I'm after, and my knife rips the mana, life energy, out of the mo'o and feeds it into me.

It almost hurts. The mo'o has so much life that my mana network almost can't hold it. As it is I feel stretched to just below the point of pain. Almost bloated. Fortunately I have a way to burn off the excess energy quickly.

Keeping myself vanished from all senses, I take to the roof tops again, I just feel more comfortable high up, and go looking for my next target.

Two down, three to go.

###

With full, over full really, mana I don't expect the rest of them to be too difficult. I have a better idea of where to stab them to kill them quickly after the last one, and sneaking up on them will be easier now. Still I make sure to ration my mana as dearly as I can, just because I have plenty right now is no reason to get into bad habits.

I find the third at the stacked stone temple at the top of the village. The one that only Pua and the Ali'i are allowed up. I still have no idea what was up there, but apparently Pua's serious about not letting anybody else up top given how violent the wards are being. The temple is a stacked stone step pyramid, it never comes to a point. That leaves plenty of open space at the top, it being just tall enough to make sure that there's no place in the village where one can see the top of it. The area surrounding it is bare grass, which makes it easy to see the mo'o pounding her way through the wards set around the temple. Wards which are doing their level best to kill her back.

The mo'o is making progress, but not much. The spells around the temple are apparently more powerful than those around the village. Probably older, so they've had more time to grow and more generations laying them down.

Pua mentioned once that rededicating the temple after it's been violated requires a voluntary human sacrifice, so I should probably stop the mo'o before she gets much further.

Wrapping myself in my I'm not here illusion again, I creep up behind the mo'o. Or try to. The bolts of power that the shape shifted dragon is throwing at the temple wards are creating backwash that isn't easy to avoid, never mind the retaliatory blasts from the wards themselves. Reflected and evaded bits of destructive energy fly every which way in unpredictable patterns.

Still I manage to weave my way through the impromptu bullet hell, and slide into the safe zone immediately behind the Kauaian shape shifter. I line up my knife to try and kill the woman with my first hit, as opposed to having to search for the weak spot, when the mo'o twists and suddenly all I can see is the sky.

I have the brief feeling of being airborne, then crash to the ground. I gasp for air, and only then does twelve different flavors of agony radiate from my upper arm. A quick glance at how my arm above the elbow has twisted and flopped, literally bonelessly, tells me that the problem is more than a simple break. The trouble I'm having breathing tells me that I have at least one cracked rib as well.

If my skeleton hadn't been troll bone, that one back hand from the dragon in human skin might have torn me in half. At least I know that ambush tactics are absolutely the right way to go with these. Which begs the question, what went wrong?

It only takes me a few moments, with the clarity of thought that only adrenaline combined with desperation can provide, that I come up with a potential answer. I remember that the illusion failed when I'd been, overly focused shall we say, watching the Sirens as well. Apparently while easier, 'I'm not here' is still too much for me to keep going if I'm paying attention to anything more complicated than moving at the same time.

The mo'o saying something in Old Hawaiian gives me the impetus to focus my wandering thoughts on the present again. She's walking towards me at a slow casual walk as she unwraps the cord with a stone on the end from around her waist, and begins to spin the weight.

That looks like it would hurt.

Frantically, I search for where my destroyed right arm lost my knife. At the last moment I spot it, surprisingly not too far away, off to my right, and fling myself at it in a desperate dodge. I scream through gritted teeth as my arm jolts in response to my movement, but I manage to get my good hand on the knife and vanish again. I'm not here! As just behind me the weighted end of the cord hits the ground where my head had been a moment before. The damn thing strikes hard enough to raise a cloud of dust, and leave a small crater from the impact.

Troll bone or not my head would have exploded from that sort of impact.

I keep moving as I have no doubt that she'll hit where the knife had been next. I'm not here. I'm nearly sobbing from the pain, but keep myself moving from nothing but pure stubbornness. I'm pretty sure that my humerus has been turned into gravel from that first hit.

I'm more than a little afraid of what will happen next. If the mo'o just starts blanketing the area with attacks in an effort to get lucky, I'll have to focus too much on dodging to keep up the illusion. I'm not here. Which would make hitting me much easier.

Luck is with me for once, the mo'o seems surprised by my vanishing act and pauses looking around her. Apparently she hadn't been aware of my appearing out of thin air behind her, or just wasn't expecting me to pull the trick again. Or she saw me coming early enough that she was willing to try and bait me in close with her supposed ignorance of my presence, and I'd been visible the entire time. I'm not quite sure when I lost focus on the illusion after all.

I have no idea which theory is true and it hardly matters now. I'm not here. With her doing nothing but turning in a circle, her weighted cord at the ready, I have no trouble staggering my way over to her and plunging the knife through her stomach and up. Luckily, again, I do something right and the Script immediately activates, and I again suck down a dragon shifters life force.

I haven't really used up all the mana I'd gotten from the last mo'o, which had nearly over filled me. This time there's far more energy than I can hold. It fills my network to bursting, and then starts to leak through into the rest of my body as the channels it should flow through begin to tear... rupture? Describing how a metaphysical circulatory system fails is hard, and at least decent at distracting me from the pain. I feel stretched, like an overfull balloon, as the mana pounds against the inside of my skin, straining to find somewhere to go. It feels like I'm about to get ripped to pieces.

My rib fractures fusing and my regeneration beginning to do something with my arm drains mana quickly, but not quickly enough. Even trollish regeneration can only work so fast, and will only use up mana at the speed it works. While I haven't lost a limb, with a shattered bone I might as well have. A month to regrow an arm, hopefully since I haven't actually lost any mass it will go faster, but I'm not holding my breath.

In fact I'm panting, I feel like my skin is paper thin and brittle. I glance down at myself and my eyes widen in horror. My arms and legs are riddled with faintly glowing cracks, like glass in the process of shattering. In places my skin has split open wider, in larger wrents letting an almost neon blue light escape. Hesitantly I pass my fingers through the narrow jets of light shining from the tears in my flesh, and have to bite my lip to keep any noise I might make inside. The light feels like mana. My mana newly absorbed, forcing its way free of my body which has no more room for it.

I shudder, if the force of excess mana inside me can rip my skin open to relieve the pressure... if I over charge by too much would I just explode?

Not something I want to find out, but it seems likely given what's happening to me already.

I take a deep shuddering breath, watching with some amount of relief as the cracks begin to shrink, my regeneration starting to overcome my internal mana pressure. The larger wounds slowly started to glow less, though they aren't closing yet. There's nothing I can do about that right now, save making sure my mana doesn't go too high again, in addition to making sure it doesn't drop too low.

With gritted teeth I force myself to my feet, and to focus on what I can affect right now past the burning thrum just under my skin.

Still I have a job to do.

Three down, two to go.