March 21st, 2023
Arya's POV:
Although cleanup in the town went pretty fast –it basically just consisted of us telling the inhabitants the following morning that there had been a Kishin Egg stalking them and killing those people out alone, we'd killed it, and if they had any further problems, they could and should contact the DWMA as soon as possible– we were in for a spot of slightly bad news when we finally managed to drive the truck back to the capital.
Apparently, even though we'd managed to fly direct from Nevada to here, there weren't any return flights for a few days –and as important as DWMA students were, neither they nor we wanted to put an additional plane in the air solely for taking four (4) passengers back to our hometown. So, we'd done some logistical jujitsu and figured out we could hop a plane to Mexico City today, which had plenty of flights going to and from Death City, and arrange for another flight home from the airport there.
It wasn't my ideal way of spending a Saturday, but hey, as needs must. Plus, it was rather nice in a please-god-look-at-the-silver-lining-or-I'll-cry way to be doing all this traveling. Depending on how long it took between flights, we might even be able to do a little sightseeing in Mexico City before we went home.
I should've known better than to open my big mouth.
"Body is of teenage male with… urgh, pronounced evidence of decay. Eyeballs, most of the fingers, and a significant portion of the lips and cheek have been scavenged by an unknown predator or predators. What remains of the hands shows skin sloughing and wrinkling characteristic of washerwoman's changes, indicating that immersion was prolonged, which matches cause of death. Decomposition was hastened enough by the warm water that judging any further post or pre-mortem injuries by eye… is impossible at our current level of expertise." I said into the tape recorder I was holding, keeping the cloth mask firmly clamped over my mouth with my other hand. The nice thing about the morgue was how it was highly chilled (due to both being underground and having extreme air conditioning) in order to help prevent anything pathologically destructive from happening inside the bodies it stored.
The bad thing about the morgue was literally everything else.
"Seven other corpses matching this basic description have been brought in…" I had to pause a moment and swallow thickly as the scent of rot permeated a few molecules deeper into my nose. "…guh, within the past few months."
I nodded to Rex, who hastily threw the thin white sheet back over the body on the steel slab between us. We both shuddered.
"City officials are unclear about source of scavenging, although the method of death has been positively confirmed in all cases, i.e. water in the lungs via drowning. Similarity between cases has led them to believe that Kishin Egg or serial killer may be involved." I said after we hastily stepped away from the slab, standing at the other end of the room. That was the other nice thing about how freezing cold they kept the air here: it was really difficult for scent to travel away from its source.
"The coroner also reported hand-shaped bruises around throat, wrists, and occasionally the leg, which indicates that the drowning was not accidental." Rex added as he removed his glasses, starting to polish them feverishly. I had the same feeling –I wanted to dunk myself in a bath of medical solution to clean off even the thought of death from lingering on my skin.
I hummed.
"Anything specific about the bruises?"
"Uh, hang on a sec…" Rex murmured, hastily sliding his glasses back on and reaching for the papers that had been left on the nearby desk. He paged through them, eyes narrowed. "Ah… the bruises match the spread of a human hand, four fingers and thumb, a palm, and so on, but the shape and the strength don't match up to each other at all. Based on the size of the bruises, the hand is about as big as a preteen's, but based on how dark they are, it was gripping these people with the strength of a bodybuilder."
"Wasn't there something else about placement?" I asked, remembering the vague and quick spiel that had been thrown at our heads as the coroner bustled us down here, consisting mostly of grumbling, only some of which was in English.
Rex shuffled a few more papers.
"Yeah. Some of them make sense if you assume the person was on the water or a bank –the bruises are by the ankles or wrists, which is where you would grab someone if you were dragging them in. But there are a few where the bruises are on the neck and on the wrist, but there's two left-hand prints."
"So what, is it something with three hands, or do we think there's more than one culprit, or it grabbed them twice, or what?"
He shrugged without words.
"Great." I sighed. "Well, anyways, none of these people had anything in common except that they were out on the water when they disappeared, and they were found in the water again later, downstream from where they were lost. Current running hypothesis, we're dealing with a river monster. Arya, out."
I clicked off the rather adorably clunky tape recorder, and then sighed, raking my hands through my hair.
"Why did we get roped into this?"
"Because people are dying and it's our job to stop that." Rex said in a tone of utter reasonableness. I glared at him.
"I meant more why here, why now, and why do I not get at least Sunday as a day off before we head back to school?"
He shrugged helplessly, but I knew why. Oh, I knew why.
It was because I had been stupid enough to say out loud, with my own mouth, that "Mexico City was nice, but I'm looking forward to sleeping in at the DWMA tomorrow" as Tessa and I had been ambling through the gardens near the airport. It wasn't precisely a death flag, but some kind of flag had certainly been proudly set in the ground at those words, and it hadn't taken more than thirty seconds before an enterprising young plot device had started running their colors up the pole.
Apparently, an assistant for one of the local coroners liked to wander this same park on their lunch break, and apparently, they had heard the word "DWMA" cross my lips. Apparently, this coroner's assistant who liked to wander parks during their lunch break was currently tense and on edge, because Mexico City's official forces were apparently starting to notice that there was a recent uptick in the amount of people drowning in the canals, and upon further investigation, that most of these deaths were basically identical, and the victims all showed signs of their souls being removed.
And apparently, two whole meister-Weapon teams were here over the weekend and wandering in the very park the coroner's assistant was wandering in. How serendipitous!
I wanted to bang my head against the trunk of one of the nearby trees. This was what I got for not paying attention to the possibility of plot instigation. I had been so blinded by riding planes and wandering about the city like a tourist that I forgot that I wasn't a tourist, and this was not a tourist-friendly world.
More a tourist-hostile deathtrap, to be honest. Tourists were one of the highest contestants for cannon fodder roles in horror media, right alongside stupid teenagers and arguing couples on a road trip.
I realized I was woolgathering and shook my head.
"Anyway, I've learned all I wanna learn from the stuff in here." I said, gesturing at the morgue with a sweep of my hand. "Let's go meet up with the others."
Rex nodded in far-too-eager agreement as we both then promptly turned to squeeze out the door and pass the unimpressed coroner, who moved past us to put things back in their proper order.
Although our meeting before agreeing to take this job had been very hasty, Tessa and Lukas were apparently determined to try and make up for possibly delaying my and Rex's education for a little bit. They wanted us to do most of the investigative work for this case, to give us practice and show them what we knew –which was why I was lugging around a tape recorder in my satchel and why we were the ones doing a preliminary sweep at the morgue.
As the two of us pushed out into the swampy heat of the midday city again, I wrinkled my nose. The semi-tropical heat was annoying for someone like me, who was used to cool forests and grassy fields, and to be honest, I still hadn't gotten used to the way that the sun was constantly laughing far and distant above our heads, like the droning of cicadas in summer.
Well, whatever.
Tessa and Lukas were waiting in the shade of a nearby plaza, iced drinks firmly in hand, and we gathered with them around the circular table.
"Okay, so, we have seven victims so far." I said as Rex fished in his own satchel, bringing out the copies of the paperwork we'd been given at the morgue's front desk and spreading them on the table. "Mix of gender and ages, and one of them –a dad and his two sons– were out on the water as a fishing group."
"Which tells us…?" Tessa encouraged.
"That if it is a Kishin Egg, it's not an evil spirit bound by rules like the last one." I said. "Or if it is, the rules are really dumb and simple, like has to be taken on/in the water or some shit. First victim a couple months back was Raquel Santos, went missing on the canals during a storm when she was trying to shore up a chinampas. Body turned up again downstream a few days later. Everyone assumed she just slipped and drowned during the storm and the missing bits were due to scavengers. The bruises around the ankle were assumed to her maybe getting her foot stuck between rocks."
"The next one was a few days later… Reyes Mateo." Rex picked up where I had trailed off, before swallowing tightly. There was rattling off the standard victims, and then there was this. "Eight years old. Their family was playing in a park by the canals, and when the parents realized they hadn't seen them for a while, they got worried. Even though everyone in the park searched, they couldn't find the kid before dark. Police pulled the body out of the canal downstream the next morning. Same bits, gone: lips, fingers, eyes."
"Which made a couple of people antsy, since the kid would've been in the water less than twenty-four hours and he was already…" I swallowed too. "Scavenged. Anyway, it was weird, but the two incidents didn't seem related, so nobody pinned it as the same thing at the time, even though the kid had a bruise around their wrist like someone had grabbed them just before they died."
"The next one was the father and two sons, and it was here where the police and city officials started to take notice of something happening." Rex said, shifting the corresponding paper to lay on the top of the spread. "They went out on the canals for a fishing trip, but didn't come home in the evening. When the search crew found the bodies downstream a few days later, they noticed that all three bodies had bruises on them in the shape of a hand. The younger son had bruises around the neck, the older son around the wrist. The father had bruises around both his neck and wrist."
"The fifth victim was a lady, Maricela Correia, with, like… a sales-boat?" I said, wrinkling my eyebrows. Her job was a little hard to describe beyond peddler, which felt very archaic. "She sold flowers and trinkets and things while poling her raft around the canal system. Anyway, someone found her raft drifting without moorings almost a week after the father-son trio went missing, and a lot of her products were turned over and thrown around, like there might have been a struggle. Kinda hard to tell, though, since the raft would've been drifting around and bumping into a lot of things before they found it. When they found her body, the same bits had been scavenged, and she had bruises around the neck and both wrists."
"Sixth victim was Lucas Pavía, a few days later. Apparently, he was an older gentleman who had been out drinking with his friends." Rex said. "His path home took him across one of the tributary streams that feed into the canals, and when they couldn't find him the next morning, his friends called the police. When they dragged the canals, there he was, drowned and scavenged, with bruises around his right ankle."
"Seventh victim was three days ago, Yeray Alfonso." I finished. "He was out swimming with his friends in the canal near their house, but according to them, he vanished all of a sudden while swimming beneath the water. They couldn't find him and went home in a panic to tell their families. His body was found later that evening, missing lips, eyes, and fingers. There were bruises around both ankles."
Lukas and Tessa exchanged pleased looks.
"So…?" Lukas asked, glancing back at us. I took a sip of the iced lemonade that had been waiting for us before I answered.
"The first thing that jumps out, beside the fact that something grabbed all of these people, was where and how it grabbed them." I said slowly, tapping the page about the father and sons. "Maricela Correia and Óscar Soares were both adults, and they got grappled with two hands. Lucas Pavía was presumably drunk at his time of immersion, Raquel Santos was distracted fixing storm levees, and they were both only grabbed by one ankle. Reyes and the two Soares sons were all children and/or teenagers, and they were only grabbed once, too."
"Whatever it is, it's not very strong." Rex said, following my chain of thought. "Or if it is, it likes catching people by surprise."
"Ambush predator." I said in satisfaction. "That's probably why Yeray had bruises on both ankles: while he was swimming around under the surface of the water with his friends, it grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him down from below before they could notice."
Which was a chilling thought, now that I imagined it. I shook my head.
"Anyway, judging by the size of the bruises and the way it favors catching people off-guard, this thing is probably smaller than the average adult, even if it's also a lot stronger. And judging by the way that… ergh, all the same bits and pieces are missing from the victims, it's probably also eating more than just their souls."
"What makes you say that?" Tessa asked.
"The… the first kid, Reyes, wasn't in the water for very long." Rex explained, looking a little green about the gills due to our subject matter. As well he should. "According to our decomposition unit, unless the person dies very close to a group of animals, not a lot ends up eaten within the first few hours. Animals need to find the body before they scavenge from it."
"So given how much was stripped off this kid, whatever killed him was also almost certainly what ate him." I said with finality, giving Rex a proud nod.
Tessa's unreadable expression stretched into a slight smile at our answer, clearly already having figured all of this out already, but pleased that we could follow the appropriate reasoning. Lukas took a sip of his own iced drink, but also looked pleased.
"Anyway, what we've got here is an ambush predator, something smaller than an adult human, with an above-average grip strength, that eats physical flesh along with the souls of its victims." I summarized, before taking another sip of my lemonade. "Hmm?"
"Seems pretty airtight." Tessa said, fiddling with one of her many ear piercings. This, however, seemed to be a more lazy and idle movement than Rex's nervous tell. "You guys aren't half-bad at this."
"Thanks." I said as Rex looked even more pleased than before. "So… what is a super-strong ambush predator smaller than an adult that eats human flesh along with souls?"
"No idea." Tessa said bluntly. Lukas sighed.
"Like you said earlier, it's probably not an evil spirit." he told us, folding his hands on the table. "They're almost never that physical, and they never eat anything other than human souls. It's probably not a corrupted human who began eating other souls, either."
"What's your reasoning?" I asked.
"Whatever this is, it seems completely at home in the water… and there's also the matter of scavenging bits of the dead corpses."
"Ooh." I winced. "Yeah."
"Most humans, even when they become full Kishin Eggs and lose their humanity, keep a lot of their old mannerisms." Rex said with authority, surprising me a little. Then again… I was the only person here who hadn't been raised in Death City. "It's not unheard-of for them to cannibalize parts of their victims aside from the soul, but it's also pretty rare. They kill people and eat their souls because they want power, or to become stronger, even if the why they want that varies from Kishin Egg to Kishin Egg. There's no reason for them to eat the flesh."
"And 'cannibalism is gross' is pretty deeply ingrained in most cultures." Tessa said with a dismissive flick of her hand.
As interesting and slightly disturbing as this was, I felt we were getting off-topic.
"So it's not an evil spirit, and it's not a human gone rogue." I said, unashamedly looking lost. My only frame of reference for Kishin Eggs was exactly those two things. "So what else could it be?"
"A Monster." Tessa said with the triumph of any teacher imparting a valuable lesson to a student, swirling the ice around her glass with a straw. I blinked.
"Ohhhhh…" I said, my eyes widening as epiphany hit. "You mean like-"
You mean like Mosquito, I almost asked a trio of very confused DWMA students who probably hadn't even heard of Arachnophobia at this point, much less one of its top flunkies.
"-uh, a monster that… er…"
"Monsters are people or animals born with magic that is difficult but not impossible to actually channel intentionally, unlike Witches or Sorcerers." Rex said, taking pity on me. That sparked a memory of some of the research I had done about different types of magic-users in this world less than a few months ago, and I could've smacked myself. Monsters, right.
"They're typically neutral, but there are cases like this, when an animal-based Monster starts attacking humans, and they can easily turn into Kishin Eggs." Tessa continued, the ice in her glass clinking. "Given how it's pulling people into the water directly, it's probably a very low-level Monster. Most of what magic it's got would be either fueling its strength or its intelligence, making it smarter and stronger than it should be… with maybe a few extra mutations here and there."
"Mutations." I said flatly, narrowing my eyes.
"Y'know, the saliva is acid, or it's got six eyes." Tessa shrugged with a frankly disturbing amount of nonchalance, considering the subject matter. "Random stuff that helps it do whatever it does better, or that the magic started channeling into when it was young."
"Oh, goody."
"Well, either way, we've figured out what it is, so now we need to figure out what to do about it." she said, clapping her hands together with a grin. "You guys missed the feeding pattern: this thing takes its victims once every few days, maybe a little longer if it's grabbed a big meal. And since the last person was taken three days ago…"
"I don't like where this is going." Rex whispered to me, face pale. I nodded.
"It'll probably be hungry again soon." Tessa finished triumphantly. "Which means we have a clear and easy route to killing it."
"It should be easy enough." Lukas said, dooming us all. "One team goes out on the water to try and lure it in, and once it's taken the bait, the other team blocks off the canal system to make sure it can't get away."
"Aaaand what happens to the team on the boat then?" I asked nervously.
"Dude, you're an EAT student. I shouldn't have to tell you that." Tessa scoffed.
Rex and I exchanged another look.
"So… how do we decide which team does what?" he asked, and Tessa held up her hand, splaying her fingers at us with a grin.
"Rock paper scissors?"
"Rock paper scissors is a bitchass, stupid way to decide things." I announced as I slipped the mooring rope off the post, coiling it up and dropping it in the boat. Rex, paddle in hand, nodded in nervous agreement as I set one hand on the dock, pushing us off on a slow drift into the middle of the canal.
In what was probably not a surprising revelation at all, neither me nor Rex were particularly good with boats. I'd gone on a canoeing daytrip once, and rowed a rowboat once, which gave me a whopping twice as much experience as Rex –who, once again, was raised in a desert. All in all, we'd probably make for pretty good bait, considering how neither of us was confident in the water and our boat was probably going to be shaking and wobbling all over the place as we paddled.
We were in something that my limited experience deemed akin to a canoe or a gondola: long and narrow, with raised sides, but not as stout as a rowboat or a motor launcher. It had four seats, but because Rex and I needed to be close to each other to use him as a Weapon, I was sitting in the back with him only two seats ahead, instead of in the front –where, apparently, he'd be able to steer us a lot better.
Person in front steers, person in back powers. I remembered that much from my brief canoeing lesson and Tessa's quick rundown. I would push us along with even strokes on each side of the boat, and Rex would be the one deciding our direction with his paddle up in front. Simple. Easy. Totally not going to go wrong. We could handle this.
The sunlight was slanting golden and orange over the network of canals that ran through Xochimilco, a district on the outskirts of the city, and I was conscious that we were on something of a time limit as Rex picked a direction at random and we began cautiously paddling off, keeping to the center of the canal in an attempt to avoid the other boats moored up along the sides. If the sun got low enough, it would start reflecting off the water directly into our eyes –which, while pretty and scenic, was an incomprehensibly dangerous thing when you were hunting a water monster.
And there was no way in fresh hell that we would be doing this at night. I'd like to live, thank you very much.
Neither of us expected to be attacked immediately as we began paddling our way to the spot Tessa had picked out, isolated enough that we would be a tempting target but also not so far that we'd probably end up ambushed –or capsize ourselves– en route. This was good, though, because it gave me time to get back into the swing of being in a boat, and Rex enough time to adjust to being in a boat, period.
Each tiny shift in weight made the not-quite-a-canoe wobble beneath us, rocking slightly from side to side. That was startling compared to the rock-solid support of the ground, particularly when you weren't used to it –and you couldn't help but worry about over-extending with each reach of your arm, feeling the boat lean subtly with your body and wonder if you were reaching too far and you'd fall over, dragging it onto its side with your legs.
Still, we were getting the hang of it. I dipped my double-bladed paddle from one side to the other, powering us forward in long, mostly-smooth strokes, and Rex slowly grew confident enough to dip his own paddle in the water, pulling us to one side or the other. We even worked on coming to a stop a few times, sweeping our paddles backward on opposite sides of the boat to bring us to a slow dragging halt. Synchronizing that took a few tries, but luckily for us, we were slowly bringing our boat into the more deserted stretches of the canals, and there was very little traffic to worry about.
In fact, as our boat began to glide forward along the water with increasing confidence, there were getting to be less and less rafts and other small personal vessels moored to the local docks –and less docks overall. The green fronds hanging over the sides of the chinampas grew thicker, the ends of weeds and roots trailing into the water. If I wasn't so tense about something reaching up and grabbing me from beneath the water, it would have been quite beautiful –as it was, I kept both eyes on the still, glasslike surface of the canal and ignored the gardens floating out of the water around me.
It would have been really nice to come here purely as a tourist, and I made a mental note. If I ever got the chance again, here or in my own world, I should come back for a visit.
Our first few turns through the network of the canals were slow and shaky, as befitted two beginners. I'd stop paddling for a bit as we both tried to ease the boat sideways, letting our momentum gently guide us as it slanted to the side, before digging our paddles into the water and pulling ourselves into the adjacent canal with powerful strokes. Clumsy, yes, but efficient, and it wasn't like we were trying to win any races here.
Unconsciously, I tilted my head a little, rubbing my ear against one upraised shoulder. There was a phantom itch there, a scratchy, prickling feeling in the small pink scar sliced like a piercing into the curve of the upper lobe. The last time I had been in a boat like this, it had been choking and juddering with hypothermia, clutching onto a smaller warm body and curling around him desperately in the bottom of a fiercely-rocking lifeboat, chemical-reeking blood splashing down on us and rotted nails gouging into the sides. One clawing hand had even pierced a nail straight through my ear –hence the new-old scar.
But it was fine, I told myself, trying to calm my racing heart. Although we were further north than Guatemala and the air on the canals was much less humid, paddling through Xochimilco was much different than the icy northern Atlantic. It was as warm as a balmy summer day, there was a sharp scent of cypress and other plants I couldn't identify in the air, and I was –probably– not going to run into any decomposed corpses anytime soon.
That was the other reason why we needed to get this done before the sun started setting for real –if Tessa had predicted this thing's feeding pattern correctly, it was out prowling for a meal right now. We were trying to use that to lure it in and kill it, but if it didn't find us, or it found someone else first…
Well, no prizes for guessing what would happen. Most tourists and locals had started to avoid the canals after the fourth or fifth victim, but some people needed to use them for work at fishing or sailing, or because they lived on one of the chinampas. There'd be other potential victims out on the canals right now. Sure enough.
I shook away such grim thoughts and clenched my jaw. We were the monster-hunters, the inciting incident of the story. The Kishin Egg was going to come to us first. I held onto that conviction desperately, ignoring all the many, many horror trope subversions that could prove me wrong. Last time it had worked flawlessly, and we'd killed the Kishin Egg before it could harm anyone else. We'd do the same thing again today.
Nothing worth mentioning happened as we paddled our slow and clumsy way into the section of the canals we planned to start acting as bait in. We saw Tessa and Lukas in the distance, sitting high on the roof of some kind of shack on a chinampas as they watched us keenly. That was reassuring, a little bit: the knowledge that even if the monster grabbed us and dragged us down, they'd be after us in a heartbeat. So unless it bit your face off first thing, we'd probably be rescued…
"All right." Rex said, bringing up his paddle and laying it horizontally across the boat in front of him. I coped him as we began to drift. "…now what?"
I shrugged.
"We act like live bait." I said.
"And how do we do that?"
"Fuck if I know. How's your Scooby Doo and/or Shaggy impression?"
Rex twisted in his seat to give me a baffled look.
"My what?"
"Ah, never mind." I sighed, clicking my tongue and shaking my head a little in disappointment. "Uncultured swine. Anyway, this thing seems to go after people leaning over the water, so… let's drift around and see if we can see anything on the bottom?"
"You could've just said that at the beginning."
"Well, maybe I didn't have that idea at the beginning." I said, before grinning at him. "Your idiocy inspired me."
Rex glared at me flatly, before he shook his head and turned around with a sigh.
"You know, it's not my fault I haven't seen any of your… whatever family thing that is." he said, carefully skirting around the topic of Witch as we so often did as he began to paddle again.
"It's a TV series, and how dare you."
"I didn't even know your family got TV."
"Scooby Doo is a sacred part of American culture, and I will whack you over the back of the head with a paddle if you even dare suggest otherwise." I sniffed.
Despite having his back to me, I could tell Rex was rolling his eyes.
"Death, you're weird." he mumbled under his breath, although not too quietly that I could tell he was trying not to let me hear it.
"Yes, well, remind me again why you're stuck with this particular weirdo as your partner?"
Rex had the good grace to cringe guiltily.
Still, all banter aside, we worked together well enough to drift the boat off down one of the canals, peering over the edges at the water below and making exclaiming noises of pleasure as we did our best to mimic a pair of appetizingly stupid tourists. The glare, thankfully, wasn't bad, and I could peer down through the murky water that was that particular shade of blue-grey-green, trying to see what, if anything, I could see.
It was slow going for a while. The water in the canals wasn't stagnant by any stretch of the imagination, but it also was far from crystal-clear. Most of what I could see was up close by the surface, which was the roots and banks of the chinampas trailing down into the water by the side of the canal, and a whopping absolute nothing in the center where we were. Occasionally, at particularly exciting moments, I spotted a drift of tall weeds stretching up from the abyss below, or saw the thin and arrow-like twitch of what might have been a fish scuttling out of range.
My hand was clenched in a vice-grip around the thin slat of the seat I was on as I continued leaning over the edge, occasionally dipping the paddle in to scoot us forward or bump us gently away from a bank. The lurking darkness of the water below was like an itch across my skin, knowing that there might be something, feeling danger radiate up through the bottom of the boat and soak into my shoes like a physical heat.
It was all in my head, or mostly, but it didn't help that I didn't know what the hell the creature we were after would even look like. The presence of hands indicated humanoid, but my admittedly limited monsterology knowledge of Central America wasn't ringing any bells as to what that might be. In all honestly, my only thought was some kind of gremlin or siren-like creature –and the fact that most of the victims seemed to have been dragged under and held there until they drowned made me lean towards gremlin. If it was something like a siren, it should be able to lure people in by pretending to be a person instead of just grabbing them.
"Hey, I think I see something." Rex said, and my head snapped towards him in the keel of the boat as he leaned curiously over the edge, staring at the water. Almost before he had finished his sentence, I was scrambling forward, and that was the only thing that let me snag the back of his white dress shirt in time as something rocketed up out of the canal in an explosion of water and seized him by the face to pull him in.
Rex screamed, as who could blame him, and the whole boat rocked as he lurched forward against the edge, both hands slamming against it in a desperate effort to keep from being dragged down as I leaned back, desperately holding onto him by the back of his shirt as I struggled to act as a counterwight and keep us from capsizing.
Well, there went my assumptions that it was a gremlin.
From what little I could see as we both heaved against the weight dragging on Rex and the water churned and frothed dangerously beneath our boat as whatever it was thrashed to try and pull him in, Rex's face was being seized by a hand covered in slick dark fur, which led to a furiously undulating limb that I was choosing to believe was a tail and not some kind of furry tentacle. Bumps vibrated through my knees, indicating that whatever was down there was knocking against the canoe as well.
"Transform!" I yelled, and Rex thankfully did so, writhing out of existence in a flash of bluish light as the hand grabbing his face snapped shut on nothing and I gripped Rex's hilt with relief. I wasn't quite quick enough to heft his blade up and sever the tail-hand as it shot back into the water, but I was pretty sure that I gave it a parting nick on the way down as I awkwardly flicked Rex to the side, not wanting to lunge forward and overbalance but also not willing to let the creature get away.
Silence fell for a moment as I collapsed back against the canoe's sloping sides, bracing myself as it slowly rocked back into a balanced position. Standing up right now would be a colossally bad idea, I did remember that much. The closer my center of gravity was to the surface, the more stable the boat would be, and I particularly did not want either one of us to fall in at this point.
A loud hiss and rush of water in the distance told me Tessa and Lukas had seen us get attacked and were working to close off the canal with floodgates that were apparently built into this particular stretch –another reason she had decided to make this our ambush spot.
"You okay, dude?" I asked, gasping. Rex hummed slightly from where he lay lengthwise across my legs.
"The talons scratched my face a bit, and I think my glasses are bent, but other than that… no." he said, before he devolved into fussy mutters. "Oh Death, the lenses are smeared something awful."
"Just with water though, right?" I asked, only to stiffen as something very pointedly bumped up against the side of the boat behind me, sending us rocking ominously again. I'd dropped my paddle when I'd scrambled to grab Rex before his portentous statement got him dragged to an early watery grave, and I think Rex's was twisted somewhere underneath us at the bottom of the canoe right now. Too unwieldy to retrieve.
"Doesn't matter right now." Rex said as I felt a distant jolt of fear, like sharing a spark of electricity between a chain of hands. "What do we do?"
Good question. Rather than answer it aloud, I began to carefully adjust myself in small increments, not wanting to be sprawled across the boat like it was a hammock. All awkward positioning problems aside, it left both my legs and my head in very good positions to be seized and pulled in.
The boat was bumped several more times as I slowly got up onto my knees in the center, and it was no less alarming each time as the water splashed and clicked beneath us –especially when the nudges seemed to be getting stronger. I had never before felt Rex so unwieldy, so clumsy, so unnecessarily big in my hands. What I wouldn't give right now for a good, agile dagger, or maybe a bow and arrow.
"You guys okay?" Tessa called from one bank, and I half-lifted my shoulder in an awkward eh-maybe-not gesture.
"I'm just now realizing that maybe fighting a water monster on the water when you're shit at balancing in a canoe is a really bad idea." I shouted back.
"You're doing great!" she said as Lukas came to join her.
"How is this great?!"
She gave us a disturbingly excited grin, all flashing teeth and glittering piercings.
"Well, you're not dead yet!"
"I fucking hate you." I muttered under my breath, one eye twitching. Even though she probably hadn't heard me, Tessa understood my glare very well, and she had the audacity to laugh from where she stood all safe and sound on the bank.
The boat was bumped again, making me spread my knees wider with a gulp of fear.
"Now what do we do?" I asked aloud, repeating Rex's question back to her.
Tessa cocked her head and studied the water. We held ourselves, waiting, even though my tightly-strung nerves rocked along with the canoe as it swayed back and forth with another hit, this more-violent bump almost tipping us over in a terrifying jolt. The pushes against the boat were definitely getting stronger.
"Looks like its ramming you!" she said at last, cupping hands by her mouth to help her voice carry across the water.
"No shit it is!"
"Don't sass me, bitch, while I'm saving your life! Hit it while it's trying to hit you!"
A sound theory, at least, although the execution sounded pretty tricky. The creature had been hitting us on both sides of the boat, almost testing where we were as it struck us by the prow, the keel, the middle, on the left, on the right. It was like the delicate tapping of an otter with a rock before it decided to break a clamshell open, trying to find the weak spots.
Except we weren't clams and I was feeling very far from happy right now.
"Alright, here goes nothing…" I muttered, trying to relax my stance as I lifted Rex up, waiting for the next bump. When it came, the boat swayed so far over I almost lost my balance, but before I could lose my nerve I twisted and slashed Rex down, scoring him through the water almost directly behind me. There was a bump of resistance as we hit something, and water splashed violently as whatever-it-was zoomed away.
Rex's tip was streaked with blood when I dragged him out of the water again and the boat rocked to a swaying standstill. My heart pounded nervously against my ribs, but this was good, right? We were making progress, as fractionally slow as it might be. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement on the bank, and blinked as I watched Lukas twirl a cable rope over his head. Since when could he lasso?
I was distracted from my incredulity as another violent shove came from directly underneath us, almost tipping me over before I hastily leaned in another direction, steadying the boat. Oh, yeah. We'd hit the Kishin Egg, and we'd made it mad. It was forgoing bumping up against us for the far more dangerous pastime of just straight-up trying to tip the boat over, presumably so it could grab us and do something unfortunate. Rex had mentioned talons scratching the sides of his face, so presumably it could rip out our throats instead of drowning us. And, of course, the corpses it had left behind contained ample evidence of a carnivore's teeth.
My throat bobbed in a thick swallow. I tried to concentrate, spreading out my awareness and tapping into any soul-sensing abilities I might have as a meister as they'd told me in class, but what was already trickily vague in a classroom setting was downright impossible when you could be attacked on any side by some sort of aquatic abomination and your heart was beating fast as a hummingbird inside your chest.
Still, I tried my best to breathe and be prepared, settling my knees wider and riding the sways of the canoe as best I could. I still wasn't a sailor by any means, but balance and momentum, I could get. If I kept us as steady as I could, no matter where the monster hit us next, I'd be ready to strike back at it.
Another violent shove from beneath the water had the boat rolling and me hastily shifting my weight to counteract it, and I saw movement in the water and slashed down again with Rex. Again I felt him score across something physical, fur and meat splitting under the tip of his blade, before there was a rush of movement and whatever-it-was was gone again.
There was a lurch and a tug from the front of the boat, and I looked up to see that Lukas had somehow lassoed the tip of us, and he handed the rope to Tessa even as I looked up and transformed, the hooked tip of his machete-like blade sinking deep into the boggy soil beside her as she began to pull us in, hand over hand. I brightened a little: setting aside how the hell we'd climb out without getting pulled down, being closer to shore was very reassuring.
Now if only the Kishin Egg didn't see the rope or interfere with it…
Thankfully, neither of these two things happened, and when we settled against the bank of the chinampas, Tessa pulled Lukas out of the ground and hooked the tip of him around the rim of our canoe, settling us firmly against the solid ground. I, nothing loath, stabbed Rex six inches deep into the ground and quickly used him as a mixture of lever and brace to pull myself out. Standing up was optional –right now, I wanted nothing more than to feel solid ground beneath my feet, even if it was soggy and humid.
Tessa unhooked the canoe as I scrambled to my feet, and we both stepped back about a meter from the edge, guestimating to our best ability just how far that tail-hand could reach. Whether we were right or not wasn't to be discovered: with an explosion of water, something big and bulky shot up from the canal, landing sprawled on the top of the edges and seats with a consummate balance that was both intimidating and made me deeply envious, considering it was only a little smaller than me.
If I had to describe the general shape of its body, I would saw dog-like, although the head was a bit rounder –something like a giant otter or a jaguar. It took me a few moments to realize that the Kishin Egg was covered head to toe in the same dark, glistening fur as the tail: now that it was out of the water, the creature's fur stood up in dripping spikes, making its pelt look more like a hedgehog than an otter. Four raccoon-like hands splayed over the edges of the boat and the top of a seat, each tipped with a fearsome talon. A fifth tail clenched and spasmed at the end of a lashing monkey-like tail.
It opened its mouth, showing us a sharp set of fangs, and a strangled, burbling wail made both of us wince, the high-pitched sound twisting and tightening like the crying of a fretful baby. This gurgling cry, however, was full of fury and hunger, and blazing eyes moved from me to Tessa with predatory intent. Beneath the bristling spikes of fur, I saw several red lines where me and Rex had cut it, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that this Monster was not a happy camper. It had come for a presumably easy meal and gotten attacked, and as its paw-hands flexed, talons drawing furrows in the sides of the canoe, it was easy to see we had roused its animalistic temper.
The Kishin Egg jumped at us, and Tessa dodged left as I dodged right, both of us swinging our blades out in readiness. The nata's shorter reach meant that Tessa would have to get in close to do any damage, but we didn't have time to look up from this very angry beast to try and make eye contact to form a plan. I just swung Rex like a bat for its flank as it wheeled to try and face me, its hands gripping at the wet earth, and the creature lurched with another hideous wail as Tessa swung down behind it, Lukas flashing in the sinking golden sunlight.
The Monster whirled again, turning its back on both of us as I saw blood streaming from the severed end (wrist?) of its tail, muscles bunching beneath that dark spiky pelt as it lunged back towards the water. While mobile on land, this clearly wasn't its element, and however angry the Kishin Egg might have been, however much it still behaved like an animal, it still had enough intelligence to at least figure out that it was outmatched.
That didn't matter, though, because I had pulled Rex up for another swing, and he came down overhand like a thunderbolt as I cleaved down through most of the creature's neck, sending it down onto its knees with a hideous wet screech. My stomach twisting at the sound, I gritted my teeth and raised his crimson-streaked blade up again, wincing at how the creature wallowed on the ground in a pool of its own gushing blood, struggling to rise and crawl towards the water, before I brought Rex down again, fully decapitating it.
I didn't particularly feel pity for a monster –sorry, Monster– that had made a habit of drowning people and scavenging bits from their corpses… but that was a particularly messy way to die. Missing the spine on my first swing meant that it could probably feel everything as I sliced its neck open, draining its strength in an explosion of blood (despite how it tenaciously struggled to keep moving) before I came in for the final chop. In the future, I resolved to do this kind of thing cleaner.
Still, the Kishin Egg had died all the same, and its body collapsed into a black silhouette that then burst into inky bands of darkness, spinning and wrapping around the floating red witchlight of the Kishin Egg soul before they dissipated. Stabbing Rex's bloody blade into the ground, I scratched the back of my head and looked at Tessa.
"Uh…"
She looked at the soul with a hint of reluctance, but gave a wry smile and held up her empty hands as Lukas transformed back to human.
"You killed it, you eat it." she said, shrugging. I raised an eyebrow.
"Did you let us kill it?" I asked suspiciously. Once was generous, but letting us have the only Kishin Soul twice was a bit suspicious when you considered how all teams were going to be partnered for the foreseeable future, and Tessa couldn't always rely on their generosity. Plus, she and Lukas had been EAT students for much longer than me and Rex, even if I vaguely remembered that their kill count was less than twenty.
Tessa gave me another of those gleaming, toothy grins.
"I'll start fighting you over who gets the soul when you're worth fighting for it." she said, although there was no sting in her words as she reached out to punch my shoulder. "Get up to our level and maybe we'll talk."
I huffed, starting to slowly grin at her.
"Which means, what, we have to get 18 souls before you start taking us seriously?" I asked, and she tossed her hair with a proud smirk.
"Maaaaybe."
"Bitch."
"Cunt."
"Skank!"
"Fine weather we're having, huh?" Rex asked Lukas, holding the Kishin Egg in both hands as they both watched us. Lukas nodded.
"Hmm."
"Next mission we go on, you'd better not be giving me and Rex any freebies." I warned her as we turned back to the boat, starting to prepare for our outward journey.
"Next mission we go on, you'd better be strong enough that we don't need to." Tessa huffed.
"You absolute-"
The setting sun descended over a decidedly more peaceful Xochimilco as the four of us set our ambush site back to rights and began to paddle back to the docks we had launched from, bickering happily the whole way.
2.32 PM, USA Central Time
9-Ahuizotl:
(Ah-wee-zot-el [According to my monster book]) This is a water monster from Mexico, more specifically the Mexica/Aztecs that predated Spanish invasion. Sources vary if it is dog-like, possum-like, or otter-like, but imagine a big ol' spiky-furred, four-legged beast with a long tail AND A FUCKING HAND ON THE END OF THAT TAIL TO GRAB YOU AND DRAG YOU DOWN ALONG WITH ITS OTHER FOUR HANDS. Largely aquatic, ahuizotl may have been based off of real-life giant otters, which occasionally scavenge human corpses and prefer the fingertips, lips, and eyes, coincidentally the ahuizotl's favorite foods. They can cry like lost children to lure people out to water sources, and usually hunt by sneaking up submerged and unseen before grabbing and dragging the unfortunate victim down.