Cassius isn't quite a gorgon, but he's not much easier on the eyes.
Beta'd by Sesparra
Yuki Yoshimo was not having a particularly good day.
Admittedly, that was at least partially her fault, having turned down coffee when Ramirez and then Mrs. Carpenter had offered it, but in her defense she hadn't been expecting to be kidnapped by a Knight of the Blackened Denarius after going out to get tea for herself and Uncle Shiro, especially after having a front row seat to Ursiel's death the night before.
"Well then, young lady," the snake-headed being hissed, rusty patches on his dull gray scales resembling nothing so much as bloodstains before they started undulating hypnotically. "It'sss been sssome time sssinccce I broke a wizssard, ssso I might be out of practiccce."
Yuki struggled against the thorn manacles, trying desperately to call up enough power to actually do something, anything, other than die unceremoniously in a cheap motel room; to no avail as dozens of pinpricks of pain pierced the skin of her wrists under the cold steel of the manacles. Her head swam with the sensation, blood throbbing through both wrists and her still-injured shoulder.
"Foolisssh," said the Denarian, baring his fangs at Yuki. "Nicodemusss made thossse manaclesss persssonally, a wizssard sssuch asss you could never essscape."
"Maybe," came a voice from the other side of the Denarian, followed by the sound of Yuki's sword slipping free from its sheath. "But I'm not sure you can keep her."
The Denarian whirled, moving slightly to the side and just enough for Yuki to see the speaker.
She was a lanky girl (or three, but some quiet part of her mind, shouting from far off, insisted that there was only one), of middling height, with hands just oversized enough that Yuki was fairly sure that she had a couple of growth spurts left to go through. Her hair appeared almost the color of wheat, and her blue eyes sparkled with more light than strictly should have been possible in the dingy room. The mask covering her face was cheap, the kind of blue Yuki remembered from visiting her great-grandmother in the hospital, and the hoodie and sweats as well as the ruffled appearance of the girl's pageboy cut would have made her look like someone who'd just rolled out of bed, although the fact that she held Yuki's straight-edged silver sword with the kind of quiet confidence that reminded her of the times she'd seen Captain Luccio preparing to go into battle put paid to the illusion of mundanity.
"Who are you?" hissed the Denarian, four eyes glaring at the girl.
"No one to be trifled with," she quoted, and it took Yuki's addled brain a moment to recognize the line from the Princess Bride, a movie her dad had loved to put on back when she could still be in the same room as the TV without breaking it.
"I mussst know," the Denarian said.
"Get used to disappointment," she replied, a smirk audible in her words.
The Denarian hurled a bolt of hissing, seething hatred at the girl. It didn't make it within three feet of her before she swept the blade up, slicing the curse in half like so much paper and leaving both parts to dissolve.
That was… how had she managed to use the enchantments imbued into the sword? It was supposed to be all but impossible for anyone save for Captain Luccio to use the sword of another Warden, let alone an untrained teenage girl, and that was excluding the impeccable skill with which she used the blade.
Regardless of how, she'd done it, and continued to do so as she advanced on the Denarian, blade glimmering with an inner silvery-white light as it carved through spell after spell.
For a moment, it almost seemed like Yoshimo was watching Takemikazuchi wielding her blade, ascending beyond mere mortal limits to carve the very fabric of reality apart, but she blinked and no, it was just the girl, moving with skill enough to challenge Uncle Shiro and the surety of a mountain goat on level terrain.
The Denarian's head snapped forwards, fangs flashing and dripping venom, but the girl moved, flicking the blade at his chest as she stepped aside with all the care of a doctor picking up a clipboard. He screamed in pain, blood welling up in a long slash from one shoulder to the opposite hip, and collapsed forwards before rolling over, glaring up at the girl.
"Do it, then," he sneered, glaring up at the girl. "Kill me."
"Not yet, Cassius," she said, and the snake-man stiffened. "I have… questions for you."
"...Who are you?" Yuki asked, feeling more than a little bowled over by the whole situation.
"Not now," she said. "Once I finish with Saluriel's host, I can answer some questions, but for now, you'll just have to trust that I'm here in place of Captain Luccio."
Yuki opened her mouth to question things, then heard the hotel room's phone ring and hung her head.
Yeah, the past day had already been so crazy, that might as well happen too. Phone call for the Knight of the Blackened Denarius, why not?
Yoshimo looked… not great, to be honest, her skin was too pale and hair looked like it hadn't been washed in a couple days. I didn't know if Cassius had had the chance to poison her yet or not, but from the way that the pattern on his scales was dancing, he'd already started in on torturing her, and it was only the protection the Forge had seen fit to grant me that prevented me from succumbing to whatever hypnotic spell that had sucked Yoshimo in.
Granted, I hadn't been feeling much better this morning than I had before getting hit over the head by the Forge, but it was fine. The adrenaline rush would buy me more than long enough as long as I kept the Denarian on the back foot.
"I suggest," I said, raising Yoshimo's sword to rest, edge gleaming despite the flickering bulbs in the cheap motel room, against his scaled neck with one hand and placing her sheath on the ground next to me with the other, "that you drop whatever spell it is you're using on the good Warden."
"Or what?" he hissed.
"Or," I said, making an effort to keep my tone mild enough that it wouldn't be out of place on a grocery list, "I find myself with no choice but to find out how much of you I have to skin for this very nice sword to end the spell."
The Forge flashed as he glared up at me defiantly for a moment, but before he could do more than that, I shifted the sword the barest fraction, just enough to be able to nick his skin with exactly the same resistance as it would face were I to nick a sheet of paper- that being none at all.
"Alright," he grumbled, the energies bound by his will subsiding. "What do you want to know?"
"Why take the Warden?" I asked, glancing over at where Yoshimo seemed to have passed out. To be fair, I couldn't really blame her, after getting kidnapped and mind-whammy'd by a Knight of the Coin, I probably would have passed the fuck out back when I was fresh out of my apprenticeship too.
"Lasssciel wasss… the long-term gambit, especially once it wasss you who took her coin. We needed more immediate information, essspecially once the intervention of the Wardenssss prevented Ursssiel from removing the wizssard from the sssituation." He leered at me in a way that, had he done anything but make direct eye contact, would have had me denouncing him as a creep. "Ssspeaking of which… how'sss ssshe doing? Not too sssmall a living ssspaccce for her majesssty?"
I could feel Lasciel's temper rousing distantly, as if hearing the air conditioner kick on from outside, and registered her words with the same indistinct lack of clarity. "Bold words from the angel who dwelt in the gutters for long enough for his host to take on scales and learn to slither for his sake!"
"Oh, she's perfectly fine," I said, baring my teeth at the Denarian in the kind of expression that wiped that smug-ass look right off his face like I'd threatened to annihilate the Shroud. "Well. As fine as anyone can be when they're in the hands of the Chosen of the Celestial Forge who has great, justifiable reason to do them harm for endangering their baby sister." I tilted my head, calling up an illusion of bloodred flames leaking from the corners of my eyes. "How safe would you say you're feeling right now, on a scale of one to ten?"
I'd give Snakeboy this much, he wasn't an idiot, and he showed it by having had a spell building up under my nose.
He spat out a cloud of venom into my face, and while I managed to manifest the helmet that came with the Future Witness and my lab coat, the cloying cloud of poison still covered my face, blocking my vision for the time it took the VISR systems to spool up, and in that time he coiled his body around me and hurled me across the room like an empty mug.
Despite how off-guard he caught me, I still had more than enough time to react to such a simple move, and I drove Yoshimo's sword into the floor, pivoting around the hilt to land on my own two feet, a little bit bruised, but ready to rumble.
The sword slid free of the ground wholly unmarked, a testament to Luccio's craftswork and enchantments, and I cleared it almost on reflex before raising it to point at the serpentine Denarian, who had summoned his own blade of bone-white steel.
"I will apologizsse to Lasssciel for thisss," he hissed, tongue flickering as he raised his sword in a disdainful bastardization of a dueler's salute. "Losssing a hossst after ssso little time isss hard, and ssshe can't have had enough time to break you to her preferencesss."
"Bold words," I said, sheathing Yoshimo's blade in a glowing corona of my will, reinforced by Soulfire, as my coat, boots, and bodysuit replaced the hoodie and sweats I'd used as a disguise to get here, "from someone who had to jump out of a sewer to take even a novice Warden down. Tell me, how is Pennywise doing?"
The Denarian snarled, lunging forwards a touch faster than I'd expected, swinging his blade down to cleave me into two messy pieces,
Still, for all that he was fast, he was clearly more a sorcerer than a swordsman, and his blade skittered off of the katana in my hands, before I rotated Yoshimo's sword and the edge caught on his blade, cleanly slicing through the weapon and reducing it to so much ectoplasm before I slashed out at him.
A fell wind filled the room as he backpedaled, tangible enough to shove me back a pace and prevent the sword from doing more than creasing his scales, but it died out quickly as I rammed my will through the blade itself, splitting the wind in half as the silvery light of my will washed through the room and burned every trace of the green haze that accompanied it away.
Cassius conjured a tangle of serpents directly above me, but as I rolled forwards to get out of the way, the sword's blade described an arc in my wake, bisecting the hissing spell and leaving it to plop onto the floor, dissolving into a puddle of ectoplasm.
I lunged forwards once I managed to get my feet under me, sweeping the sword around me twice. The first time, it dissipated the wave of Hellfire that the panicking Denarian had thrown at me, Soulfire infusing the blade to prevent the infernal energy from corroding through my will before it dissipated against a tool it could never hope to stand up to.
The second pass stained the blade a sickly green-tinted red, and as the Forge strobed, the Denarian collapsed backwards, chest opening up like a particularly gruesome second mouth before he started to… squish.
I was glad for the cleaning cloth I always kept in my coat's pocket as I flicked the denarius from where it had sort of oozed into existence on Cassius' head into it with the sword, before folding it up and stuffing the bloody bundle in a pocket, clearing the blade of his blood before focusing on it. After a moment, I managed to find the right frequency of energy, and the blade heated up, going from red-hot to white-hot smoothly before I cut off the energy flow, let the blade cool itself in the air, temper left intact thanks to Luccio's enchantments, and went to find where Yoshimo's sheath had gotten off to.
After a moment of searching, enough time for Yoshimo's sword to shed the heat I'd filed it with, I found the sheath where Cassius' tail had swept it and slipped the blade back into it. That done, I gathered the assorted foci that were on the table with the sword that he'd presumably taken with it, then turned back to Yoshimo, slumped forwards on the chair, and sighed. "Right, okay, let me just…"
A couple of minutes of finagling had the ropes holding her in place untied despite the gloves I had on, and though she collapsed forwards on me, I was able to maneuver her around so that she was mostly braced across my shoulders, leaving my arms free to both open a portal and defend us, in case someone decided to burst in and pick a fight with us.
Right as I tore open the slipspace portal to the Future Witness, I heard sirens approaching, and sighed. CPD was… well, I wasn't going to say they were useless in general, but right now there was nothing they could do about the Denarians that wouldn't get too many people dead for no reason, and dealing with them right now, with a corpse on the floor and Yoshimo just barely stirring over my shoulders, was more of a pain than it was worth it for what benefits I could squeeze out even if it was someone less willing to deal in collateral damage than Nicodemus, and if push came to shove I could always get Harry to pass a message to Murphy.
As the portal irised closed behind us, Yoshimo jolted, looking up and around us with wild eyes. "Holy shit! I… where are we? What happened?"
"I managed to put another one of the Denarians down and rescued you," I said, dematerializing the helmet and pulling the surgical mask off my face. "Give me a moment and I can get us back to the rest of the Wardens."
Yoshimo pushed herself up and took a long look at me, her gaze growing more and more skeptical as the look stretched on, before she broke the silence. "You killed a Denarian, on your own?"
"What, like it's hard?"
And that's that!
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