Author's note: A big thanks to reviewers Miyuki Jaganashi, for reviewing all three chapters, and Graphospasm, for adding her kind reviews to both my stories. I never knew how inspiring those little messages could be. :)
Chapter 4: Assumptions
The city was big and bustling and busy.
Hina had never seen so many people in her whole life—the population of the city vastly outnumbered all of the residents of Koorime. Only her natural ice maiden's composure kept her from gaping at all of the strange things around her. She tried to sense everything at once: seeing all of the strange forms of the demons around her, furred and feathered and scaled; hearing the tumult of voices mixed with the sounds of footsteps and animals and carts rolling by; smelling and tasting the air around her, filled with the aroma of food as well as other, less savory scents; feeling a thousand types of energy pressing around her, all familiar, yet none exactly so.
The city was primarily medieval in form, with stone and brick as the principal building material and animals as the main mode of transportation, but there were a few anachronistic elements thrown in as well, such as the telephone wires that stretched over the more affluent parts of the city. To Hina, though, it was all equally foreign.
She turned down one of the narrower side-streets, trying to find some respite from the chaos. There were fewer people here, so she concentrated on examining each person's energy signature as she walked, all but closing her eyes to help with her concentration. Each energy signature had a different feel to it, a feel that her mind interpreted as something like color. Here was the colorless green idea of a plant user; there was sparking yellowness of a lighting wielder; a little further on she felt the not-brown of an earth-type youki.
There were others that she couldn't identify—like the pulsing purpleness a street over, or the constantly shifting one behind her that she couldn't even tag a metaphorical color to—but she was pleased to recognize so many without ever having encountered them before.
As she let her senses brush ahead, she finally caught a sense of what she was looking for.
There!
She could feel the energy, so much more familiar than the others, coming from the center of a small group not far in front of her. She sped up a little to try and catch a glimpse of the ice-user, so she could judge whether it would be wise to approach. She angled ahead a little more, finally catching sight of her goal.
And promptly stopped short in shock.
The ice-master was taller than her, but had the same cold blue and cool green hair so common to her people—though they generally had just one or the other, not a headful of the one with a single long bang of the other. The demon's expression, too, was perfectly familiar to her, a coolly neutral one with just a hint of distain in those ice-blue eyes. The clothes were not the usual ones worn by the ice maidens, being were much more form-fitting than the loose kimonos they favored, but that wasn't what had caused Hina's shock.
Rather, it was what the form-fitting clothing revealed.
Thick pads covered too-broad shoulders, and the dark blue fabric that fell from them covered a completely flat chest. From there, it covered a pair of white pants as it draped around hips that weren't nearly wide enough, and then fell modestly to almost knee-length in front and back.
This ice-user…wasn't female.
Hina's mind whirled, racing over what she knew of the biology, culture, and norms of a the outside world, and as it did, she started to realize just how badly she'd miscalculated. How in any of the three worlds had she missed something so obvious?
She went again over her nebulous plans, seeing them as if for the first time. When she had pictured joining an ice clan or dojo, she had been picturing a group of women. She should have known better—she knew that the male-centered culture of the outside made the latter unlikely, and their biology made the former completely impossible.
Yet somehow her assumptions about how things ought to be had completely overshadowed the facts she knew about how things were.
Taking a breath, Hina pulled herself together. The only outward signs of her world shifting under her had been a slight stagger as she stopped in the middle of the road, and eyes open a fraction wider than usual. No one around her had even noticed anything wrong, but by ice maiden standards, she felt that to be an uncharacteristic slip of composure. Hiding her embarrassment behind her usual calm face, Hina turned down an even smaller street to make sure her self-control was firmly back in place before she continued on to her original plan to find a good place to ask for information.
She never got the chance.
"Well, what have we here?"
The gravelly voice startled her—she had been focusing too much awareness on inner matters, and had neglected to pay enough attention to the outside world.
"She does look a little lost, doesn't she?"
The second voice was much higher, almost a screech. Its owner was what Hina assumed was a bird-type demon, given that it was completely covered in feathers.
Hina looked around, assessing her situation. Along with the two who had spoken, there was one other demon in the alley, and all three were staring directly at her. Judging by the feel of their auras, none of them were very strong, but they did have her outnumbered.
"Excuse me," she said with careful politeness. "I am not lost. If you'll let me pass, I'll be on my way with no trouble."
Her phrasing was neutral, but her cold voice held a note of warning.
A warning that was apparently lost on the demons in front of her.
"Much as we'd like to," the screechy demon guffawed, "you have something much too valuable for that." It pointed at her throat.
Surprised, Hina glanced down in spite of herself. Valuable? All she was wearing around her throat was her mother's…
Her thoughts ground to a halt. She knew that too. Why hadn't she realized how foolish it was to wear a hiruseki stone in public? While they were ubiquitous on Koorime, they were extremely rare outside. That rarity had been the force behind several unpleasant incidents in Koorime history—a history she was extremely familiar with.
"That is…" She paused, searching for the right term. "—A family heirloom." Her mother's face flashed in front of her, bringing with it a flash of pain. She had died young, leaving Hina without even one sister. Rui had been the closest thing to family she had left. "I do not intend to part with it," she finished, carefully tucking the gem inside the collar of her kimono.
"Sshe doessn't intend to part withh it," mocked the third demon, its hissing voice emphasized by the thin, forked tongue emerging from its scaled mouth.
"It doesn't matter," growled the first voice. "She will part with it, one way or another. So," it said, switching its reference back to Hina, "which will it be?"
In answer, Hina's eyes glowed blue.
"Feissty one," observed the reptilian demon.
Hina held her powers in check, waiting for them to make the first move. She still hoped to end this peacefully, particularly since she had never used her abilities on a fight—or anything else in a physical fight, for that matter. When the ice maidens fought, their weapons were words—cruel, cold, precision strikes of language—but not ice. That was used for many things, from building their dwellings and public buildings, to intricate sculptures created by the artists among them, to tending their fields, to sending messages to the other tiny settlements of koorime, but not for violence.
Still, Hina had explored the more destructive side of her ice-wielding during many of the long hours she had spent trying to forget about her life. She had a fairly good idea of how it could be used to fight, but with no experience, the weaker demons would have the advantage, especially since they had both numbers and physical strength on their side.
Her hopes for a peaceful resolution were dashed when the snake-tongued demon leapt towards her with a war cry.
Instantly, Hina released her hold, and jagged chunks of ice flew from her hand towards the snake-demon. Its war cry turned to a cry of pain as the ice smashed into it. With matching cries of rage, the other two demons leapt forward, and she had to turn to fight off all three at once.
It was much more difficult than she would have anticipated. She had to try to predict and deflect three sets of attacks while trying to counterattack, and to make it worse, each attacker had a completely different attack style.
The wounded snake-demon's aura pulsed an angry purple as it kept trying to tear at her with wicked-looking claws and teeth. She formed a great sheet of ice around her left arm to block its attacks, some combination of the feel of its energy and half-remembered biology instinctively warning her not to let it even scratch her.
The gravelly-voiced demon, a big, muscular one with a single horn on its head, was the only one who was visibly armed. It swung a blacksmith's hammer, so large it might as well have been the anvil, trying to hit her like she was an annoying fly. These she had no choice but to dodge—there nothing she could do with her ice that would keep one of those blows from crushing her.
Meanwhile, the bird demon's feathered arms allowed to rise into the air—the thought flitted across Hina's mind that they really shouldn't be able to provide enough lift—and it rained down attacks from above, one of which grazed her arm while she was blocking the snake's attack.
She thought she was doing well enough, parrying or dodging almost all of the blows. Unfortunately, she was so busy just keeping up that she didn't even register the fact that none of them had even begun using their special abilities.
The first demon, with the gravelly voice, was the first to abandon simple physical attacks in favor of energy-based assault, though the other two were quick to follow. It was completely unexpected, and it was only through a sheer stroke of luck that Hina wasn't killed instantly.
With a roar of frustration, the gravelly demon made a sharp upward jabbing motion with its free arm, which Hina ignored…at least, until the ground under her rose with an equally sharp jolt. She made a valiant effort to maintain her balance, but just as the bird demon opened its mouth to scream at her, she fell hard to a ground that was suddenly much too far away.
And the building behind her exploded.
What she had thought was a scream of frustration had actually been an attack. The bird demon's element wasn't air, as she had assumed, but sound.
She rolled, ignoring the pain in her ribs, which had almost certainly cracked with the force of her landing, and just missed another rising mass of earth. This would never do. If she wanted to survive, she couldn't fight a battle where even the ground around her was an enemy.
Mustering all her strength, she managed to get to one knee facing the earth demon. Drawing on all the control she'd attained in her hours of practice, she sharpened her points of ice to needle-sharp, and let them fly before the earth-user could attack again.
The icicles tore through the demon's chest, not even giving it time to scream. Hina turned back to the remaining two even before the body finishing hitting the ground—she couldn't afford to ignore them now.
She was right not to ignore them. The bird demon screamed again, and Hina threw herself at the ground, ignoring the stabbing pain in her ribs. But she wasn't quite quick enough this time. As she heard the shriek pass above her she felt a most disorienting sensation wash over her, with her vision distorting and her stomach twisting, which was followed immediately by a sharp pain in her shoulder.
She tried to move her arm, but no amount of pain tolerance would let her use it—it was completely dead. Instead, she reformed her ice shield around her left arm and help it in guard in front of her, trying to figure out a way out of this situation.
Her whole body ached, with sharper pains from her ribs and shoulder acting as counterpoint. She only had the use of her non-dominant hand, which would make it extremely difficult to both attack and defend at the same time. She risked a glance around—the few other beings who had been in the alley with them had long since vacated the area, quite reasonably choosing to mind their own business rather than risk getting on the wrong side of a fight.
The moment of tense stillness was broken by the hiss of the snake demon, whose voice had grown almost as cold as the glaciers of Koorime.
"You killed Yurasssu." The demon took a step forward, claws curled menacingly. "You musst die."
With that, he opened his mouth wider than it had any right to go. Hina cringed, half-expecting a sound blast like his companion's.
But that didn't happen. For a moment, nothing did, except that the not-color of his aura flared up around him, pulsing its not-purpleness ominously.
Then something began emerging from the reptilian demon's mouth, a faint cloud or mist that rapidly began expanding and darkening until its true color matched the exact hue of his energy.
Oh no.
Hina's eyes widened, and she stumbled backward, turned, and ran.