Eda can confidently say that she has lived long enough to make many regrets in her life.
She can confidently say that taking on the man who dressed up like a Japanese luchador was one of them.
Feeling Spawn's jabs against her chest and face was the equivalent of being hit repeatedly by a very angry ogre. If it wasn't for her talons practically digging into the stone below her, she probably would have been sent flying across the streets from the string of blows.
The punches stopped, but the aftereffects of them lingered for what felt like eons. She was dazed, damn near tripping over her new monster of a headache that overtook her. She shook her head, ignored the pain, and clenched her fists seeing the vigilante stand menacingly, as if waiting for a response.
If she were any other person, she would have run. Heck, if this happened a few months ago, she would have run. But she wouldn't. She had a reason to stay and she will be damned if anything happened to Luz.
Deciding to feign cockiness, she simply said to him, "is that all you got," while rubbing her incredibly sore jaw, "my grandma can hit harder than that and she's dead!"
Spawn responded by allowing two chains to expand outwards from his belt, making them strike forward like a scorpion's tail, expanding in lengths that well-exceeded their logical range as they fired towards her.
Had she not been in her harpy form, she imagined that she would have been impaled by them. Thankfully, she managed to grab them before they could do such a thing and immediately used her strength to swing him around the street, knocking into empty store vendors and crate piles along the way. She swung around a few more times, making sure every vendor and crate he hit was reduced to tiny splinters, before finally letting go, sending him flying across the streets and over a rooftop.
As Spawn was soaring through the air, his cape then flared outwards and shifted into a shape that resembled the wings of a bat. He stabilized himself in the air by flapping the newly formed cape wings in place, folding his arms and staring at the harpy lady as he did so.
Eda stared at this, dumbfounded. Though she couldn't see his face from this distance, she imagined that he was giving the biggest shit-eating grin at her right now.
"Nice trick," she muttered, expanding her wings and zooming towards him. She collided with him, the impact forcing them to fight in the air with a blur of punches, blocks, parries, and jabs. In this scuffle, she managed to take a swipe at his face, forming cuts that leaked green necroplasm, earning a headbutt from the Hellspawn, forcing both to break up their aerial grapple.
They then broke away, zooming past buildings and streets entire blocks away, colliding with each other, hoping that each blow would cause one of them to be sent careening off-balance. Spawn zoomed towards her, the closing of distances made her uneasy, unaware that she almost scraped the top of a thatch rooftop. Spawn was quick, but Eda was quicker as reached out, grabbed his neck and flipped him over to drag his body across several rooftops and crashed into a chimney for added insurance, the impact shattering it into pebbles.
She then spun around rapidly, tossing him into the outside of a brick building, shaking it to the foundation. The impact formed an indent and gave her the opportunity to pin him and throw several punches to his face. This did little to slow him down as he just grabbed her and swung her to the side, forcing her own indent on the building and switching their positions. With a kick from her talons, she shook him off him, making him crash into the streets below.
With a bit of a struggle, Eda moved herself from the newly formed indent and leaped onto the vigilante below, not giving him the time to get up and landing on his back, nearly knocking him down. She used her claws to dig into his flesh, green necroplasm now staining her fingers and a few drops of it landing on the streets of the plaza below.
Spawn then took out some chains from his belt and fired them backwards from his body, making them dig into a wall behind the both of them. Using them, he pulled himself towards the wall at rapid speeds, making Eda take the full brunt of the impact. When he moved forward, Eda fell off him, clenching her fists as she groaned in pain on the ground.
"Gotta admit, lady," Spawn said as he turned to face her, cape shifting back to its normal shape, "you can certainly throw a punch. You're a bit sloppy doing it, but still…"
"And you're one tough nut to crack," the Harpy said as she got back up, slightly wincing from the pain of the impact, and reaching into her hair (feathers?) to pull out what looked like a sticky note with strange symbols on it.
She slammed the paper at the floor, her foe did not react whatsoever as it exploded into a thick smoke that enveloped the area. He stood perfectly still, only occasionally moving his head to the side.
He was then attacked from the right, sending him flying again, but only briefly as he shot his chains towards the ground. The sudden brake made Eda flip over him and onto the streets. The sudden stopping also caused a big chunk of stone held by the chains to be pulled out of the ground, heading towards Spawn who just sent a haymaker towards it, shattering it to pieces of gravel.
"Clever boy," muttered Eda as she stood up and reached into her hair again and pulled out a few glyph papers. She pulled one out and rushed towards Al while he turned around, placing a note on his chest, making it glow and enveloping him in vines.
She jumped back from his slightly struggling form, "Haha!" She yelled in triumph, but that triumph quickly turned to dread when she saw Spawn emit black jagged spikes with a green glow from his body like an angry porcupine, shredding the vines and freeing him.
"Oh, shit," she said as her adversary began to walk towards her, forcing her to pull out another paper and placing it on the ground, letting a massive icicle emit forward, impaling the Hellspawn through the stomach and making him groan in pain.
"Note to self, that is not the ice block glyph." she thought to herself, wincing at the image in front of her.
Then, the Hellspawn brought a hammer of a fist down near the base of the icicle, shattering it. But there was still the issue of a large chunk of ice still in his stomach. To solve this problem, he pulled it out, grunting how the cold stung his newly-formed wound, and threw the now necroplasm-covered ice to the ground, making it shatter.
Eda could only stare in horror as he kept moving, despite the massive hole now in his chest. She was about to use her next glyph, but Spawn closed the gap by rushing her at intense speeds and gripping her wrist holding the papers, "enough parlor tricks!" He coldly said as he grabbed one of the papers and crumbled it up.
When he uncrumbled his fist, he didn't expect the paper to turn into a glorified flashbang.
As he grunted at the sudden blinding of his eyes, Eda took this opportunity to swivel her arm out of his grip, rushing behind the vigilante and placing the last of the glyphs on the back of his cape.
"See ya, spooky," she smugly said as the glyph fired a stream of flame like the flame exhaust from a rocket, sending the Hellspawn flying towards the streets ahead. He turned and spun out of control, crashing into crates and barrels, and was dragged across the streets and walls, screaming along the way.
Hearing his screams fade away, she went forward towards the direction he was sent, knowing it would take more than that to put this monster down. Her wings carried her across as she arrived in a plaza. She looked around the fog covered area. The closed shops, barely lit lamp posts, and the statue of Emperor Belos that stood in the center of it all. She scoffed at the structure before continuing her search for her foe.
The silence was rather eerie. Not a single crumpling of a leaf or stray piece of trash being blown away by wind across the stone below. Speaking of wind, there wasn't a single gust of it, either.
Suddenly, the silence was pierced, "you're really starting to piss me off," Eda turned around to see the Hellspawn emerging from the fog, wounds still dripping fresh with necroplasm. Eda responded by throwing a punch at him, which he ducked under and, using her momentum, threw her off him, making her land onto the ground, "you've got no chance. Give up before I start getting angry."
Eda only responded by reaching into her hair, "hair sand!" she said as she tossed a bag of sand into Al's eyes. Him being staggered gave her an opportunity to rise up and deliver a flurry of punches and slashes on him. Each blow delivered was faster and harder than the last as necroplasm droplets spilled onto the floor and the impacts of the strikes echoed across the plaza, even blowing much of the fog away.
Her combo ended when she charged up one heck of a haymaker and threw it... only for Spawn to catch her fist, followed by the other fist and headbutted her hard enough for her to let go and make her see stars.
"Did anyone else get the number on that cape?" Eda said as she nearly keeled over her own steps. When her doziness wore off, Eda shook her head and regained her balance, turning around to face the Hellspawn once again.
"You are one stubborn lady," Spawn observed as his hands began to glow green with necroplasm.
"It's part of my charm," Eda said as she spit out a wad of blood, "and you're one to talk about stubbornness. You've got a hole in your torso!"
Spawn's necroplasm licked his hands like flames as his wounds began to heal in a green glow. In seconds, every cut on his face and chest disappeared, and the hole in his stomach mended itself. The sight of these wounds being reversed as if nothing happened made Eda both nauseous and shocked.
Spawn chuckled seeing the look on her face, "now you realize how much you underestimated me," he then got into a fighting stance, necroplasm flames dancing away, "I'm going to give you one last chance, ma'am: Back. Off."
Eda responded by showing her claws and readying her wings, ignoring the aching pain in all her muscles and bones. She needed no words for her answer.
Spawn narrowed his eyes, "don't say I didn't warn you."
The next few seconds felt like hours. The intense stare down between the two of them could fill any potential onlookers with a sense of dread. Both their legs tensed up as they prepared to leap towards each other with the fury of a thousand storms. Deep down, Eda knew only one would walk out of this fight intact and it wasn't her. But that didn't mean anything to her. What mattered was that Luz was safe.
"Eda!"
Speak of the Devil...
Her ears, enhanced beyond any normal human or witch, perked up at the sound of her name being called. She glanced to the side, her enhanced eyes seeing a human form riding Owlbert in the distance, barely visible in the moonlight for most, but clear as day for her.
"Damn it, kid," she thought to herself as she glanced back at the Hellspawn in front of her, "for once, could you not be a hero-"
Then, at the speed of light, Spawn disappeared and reappeared in a green flash to the side of Eda, raised a now non-glowing hand in a chopping position and struck the side of her neck.
For Eda, everything became stiff. First her body, then her mind. She fell forward, stopped only by Spawn grabbing onto one of her wings. "I warned you," he said quietly as he heaved her now unconscious form to the base of the statue, making her sit at rest.
He then heard a whooshing noise and the sound of rapid footsteps behind him. Rapidly, he turned around to see… Luz running up to him with a piece of paper and leaping upwards, sticking it onto his chest.
The last thing he felt was a feeling of overwhelming cold enveloping his body, frozen before it could properly react. What was left was the pressure of ice completely covering him.