Nothing in this world is strange.
(Chapter 2. Field Ops.)
…
They left Gallows mansion at ten o' one and approximately forty seven minutes later they find themselves in a rather messy version of hell. Kid is hissing a muted stream of curses in fluent Latin, Japanese, French and some other language Liz cannot place. His left hand is battered, somewhat bloodied and he has locked his right hand around his wrist… a makeshift tourniquet to stem the bleeding.
It is his left wrist actually, the part of him that has sustained the most injury… and while it is his non-dominant hand, he absolutely refuses to wield a gun in the remaining fully functioning hand. (He claims that he cannot use them because he needs one hand to keep steady pressure on the other, something about it being possible to die due to massive blood loss -reaper or not.)
Liz had, at sometime during her mister's elegantly complicated cussing, stepped forward and taken the weapon form of Patty off the cobblestone. In the span of a shallow inhale and half a dozen heartbeats the eldest pistol moved into a stance directly in front of the now kneeling and useless Kid. While the action effectively shields her mister from the creepy-knife-throwing-ex-butcher-kishin, it does very little to shield Kid from Liz. (She is radiating irritation in amounts so high it chokes off his resonance with her.)
She does not take her eyes from their target as she instructs him to get his reaper-bum up this moment and walk it off. She has seen him smirk off deeper cuts than this and she has seen him laugh at gunshots that blast into his shoulders. She has complete faith that this is an easy pain for him to handle. So she is not amused when he sniffs and replies that he cannot walk it off as he does not walk on his hands, though perhaps she would find her advice more applicable if she were in the company of circus performers… as they can, in fact, walk on their hands.
Patty laughs at that…which only angers the kishin, while dually pissing off both Kid and Liz further. Between Patty's giggles Liz keeps her head clear enough to shout an angry order to take cover.
There is a regrettable lack of cover in the middle of the cobblestone street and Liz is forced to kick Kid out of the path of a few well-aimed fillet knives. Kid scrapes a cheek on the stone and despite Liz's best efforts, a knife nicks the top of the young reaper's shoulder.
Kid swears in earnest now, pulling from dead languages, foreign slang terms and an incorporation of four lettered American standards… his suit is ripped and bloodied and that simply will not do. Liz looses a small burst of fire at the butcher-demon before adjusting her stance to shield Kid again. She turns and casts a glance over her shoulder to see if he is dying or simply annoyed.
The moment her head turns and her attention shifts the butcher-demon is ready, throwing an unimaginable amount of cutlery at the eldest pistol. The young reaper is still on the ground, holding his wrist… but he manages to kick his weapon's knees out from under her. Effectively sending her sprawling to the stone street and out of harms way.
Liz screeches for the span of a half second before all of the air is forced from her lungs by a graceless impact with the ground. She lays flat on her back, having avoided all of the cutlery, staring upside-down at the charging figure of the butcher-demon.
Behind her there is the hissed elegance of Kid's assessment of the current situation. It is three syllables and the amount of understatement his polished sarcasm expresses makes her want to beat him to death (Which is impossible.) or laugh at how bored he sounds while in pain.
She is still flat on her back. Blinking the hazy edges from her vision she finds Patty ready, all focus and calm in her head. Patty is waiting… like they have all the time on earth to get one really good shot on too-many-knives-kishin. There is a tugging at her soul and Liz can feel Patty asking her what she plans to do.
Right.
Liz exhales and slides back into reality, where she is still between her mister and the knife-happy-harpie. The ex-butcher-demon is still running directly at them with what looks like and illegally large butcher knife held aloft in a hand. Liz rolls over, taking up a position on her stomach, elbows on the stone, one hand cupped just under the butt of her gun. Her feet are placed shoulder width apart and she thinks she may or may not have kicked Kid in the side of his head when she rolled.
She feels Patty's surreal relaxation mashed up against the reality of the situation. Time doesn't slow for the elder weapon. She breaths out slowly and feels her heartbeat hammer into the street under her.
Eight rounds are fired.
Four go into the same hole in the demon's forehead. One round neatly blows open his left shoulder and another does the same to his right, two rounds unerringly find the middle of his breastbone and sink heavily into his chest cavity. He falls.
Their joint laughter is delayed by one instant. All that fills that space is the echo of the eight rounds and the breathing of a young reaper. Then they are laughing, decompressing and grateful and at ease. The sound isn't perfect, its born of stress and fear and the vacuum left when both vanished suddenly.
Liz rolls somewhat stiffly onto her back and Patty blinks into the form of a bubbly blue eyed girl. Kid sprawls onto his back as well, smirking.
"Your kill shot was from the ground."
The reaper's observation is quiet. A murmur against their new joy.
"Somebody kicked me behind the knees."
There is amusement everywhere in her language, he can all but see the smile on her face.
He doesn't tell her "your welcome" and he doesn't mention that she used eight shots when two would have done the job. Those words would have been redundant. Instead he is first on his feet, sliding his injured arm behind his back and extending his functional hand out to them.
…
Author notes: I do not own Soul Eater.
The italics in the bottom of chapter one really bother me, I am trying to fix them.