Road to Ouroboros

Julia let out of Ouroboros with fire at her heels. She had a new drive, and she was more focused than she'd ever been in her life. She had finally dealt with her brother, a showdown that had been inevitable. She had done herself a disservice by not preparing for it, but it had happened and now he was dead and she was alive. Ever since she thought the air tasted amazing. It was as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and a thousand new doors opened all at once.

The Legion attack on Ouroboros left some terrifying questions, and Julia personally went searching for answers. She knew she'd find them at the start of the Centriae's march to the valley of the Goddess.

"We should've left one of them alive," Bella panted when Julia stopped for a break. Julia shot her a nasty look, "Not the Dead Soul, obviously. I mean an easier target. I mean, the guards should have..." she trailed off uncomfortably.

Bella was still shaken by Julia's odd behavior during the attack. Julia seemed to recover quickly, almost too quickly, but Bella was still unsure what had made Julia act so weird and what might set her off again. She'd been on pins and needles ever since.

Julia had brought Bella along to follow the Centuriae's trail in the event that it was obscured by the elements, but for miles the trail was as clean as though it had been paved.

"These tracks," Bella breathed hard during another momentary break a few miles down the trail, "The Legion always leaves a wide trail, but this... it's like they wanted to be followed."

Julia had to agree. Even to the most indiscriminate eye the Centuriae's trail was clear. Deep footprints marching sixteen wide, discarded scraps of leather and cloth, even some of the rocks beside the trail seemed to have been cut into. The Centuriae had made no attempt to conceal their path, in fact to the Daughters it looked like they deliberately made their trail more prominent.

Julia was about to come to a conclusion about the attack when her thoughts were disturbed by a rifle retort and a pain in her thigh. A spray of arterial blood and bone fragment from Julia's left leg splattered the rocks. She whipped around pistol in hand and began firing blindly at the source of the shot while Bella dragged her to cover.

"I'm fine, I'm fine!" Julia complained when Bella tried to check her leg, "Two o'clock, they're at two o'clock! Get your rifle out!" she screamed. The auto-inject stimpack strapped to her thigh had already gone into effect, but it wouldn't reset the bone. If anything it just made the job harder, as now muscles were growing back that forced her shattered femur into odd angles. It would hurt immensely if it weren't for the fact that she had already shot up a hit of med-x prior to the shooting.

"Frumentarii!" Bella swore as she glared down her sights, "Here for us?"

"I doubt it," Julia grit her teeth and drew the Lady. Bella dropped a Frumentarius charging their position with an arc wielder in three shots. The assassin in the hills fired some return shots but only hit rock. Julia drew a bead on them through Lady's scope. There were two, not counting the one Bella removed. Assassins, possibly waiting for them? Maybe they were waiting for anyone who tried to follow the Centuriae's trail. But why? Julia thought she knew who they were after, but in order to confirm it she had to finish them off.

Bella didn't give her a chance, though. With the cold, ruthless efficiency of a trained killer Bella sniped the Legionaries with her winchester, a family heirloom of the Fiasco family. She turned to Julia and quipped, "No wind."

"Good," Julia rummaged in the pockets of her coat, "Search their bodies, bring back anything that looks like this," she pulled out a small pewter coin and tossed it to Bella. Bella nodded her head, slung her rifle over her shoulder, and went to search the dead assassins.

Julia sighed and pulled out her bowie knife, a relic from the NCR ranger she'd seduced and killed for her armor. She gripped her leg with her other hand and sliced open her thigh, a clean and precise cut. The knife was sterile, but her gloves weren't, so she was forced to re-align her femur using the blade. When it hurt a little too much she gave herself another dose of med-x. Her leg wasn't perfect, but it was the best she could do in the situation, so when her bone was more-or-less righted, she used another stimpack to seal the cut and tied her leg up with a splint. She finished as Bella returned.

"Here," Bella returned the coin with another like it. The coins were smaller than typical Legion coin, and didn't have any value. Any casual search would miss them. On one there was a design of a hunting dog, sharp nose pointed west. On the other was the same design, but gouged into the pewter was a crude x over the dog. Julia sighed again.

"Alright, this is good news. They weren't here for us. Whoever attacked us, they were after the Centurion who found Ouroboros. Send a crow to the Goddess," she started writing a message on a thin piece of paper, "We need to get a team to make a fake Centuriae trail leading away from Ouroboros."

Bella pulled a raven from inside her jacket and kissed it tenderly on the head. Julia tied the note to it's leg, and Bella sent it away in the direction of the Goddess' ziggurat. "This isn't a trail," Julia said, "This is a road. They made a road, right to us."