“By Serenity,” Jae softly intones.
“What happened here?” HLM whispers, stepping closer to Raph. He puts an arm protectively around her shoulders.
“This is what will happen to your reality if this evil one wins,” the sword intones into all of their heads. HLM jumps about a foot.
“Who…?”
“Oh, that was Diana’s sword, baby,” Raph tells her.
“Ah…well, I got a damn hot turtle for a boyfriend, day-glow eyes, and claws that pop out of my wrists and can slice metal very easily, why should talking weapons freak me out?”
“Point taken,” the sword replies with amusement.
“Ah, so these are the two new players in this little drama,” speaks a tenor voice full of haughtiness.
The group turns hastily to face the levitating man. His waist length sky blue hair flutters in the cold, dry wind. His hair matches his clothing and eyes exactly.
HLM eyes his wiry form and raises a jet-black eyebrow. “Dude, you look less like some crazed megalomaniac, and more like some kind of lily white boy band wimp.”
His eyes narrow. “You should talk, freak!”
HLM flips him the bird. “Screw you,” she tells him with a sweet smile.
Jae looks to Diana. “Same HLM.”
Diana nods. Raph, meanwhile, snickers without shame.
Ed glares at the quartet. “Let’s see how much you laugh when cut into hamburger! Slave!”
A seemingly hunched figure steps from the shadows of what used to be a skyscraper.
There’s an odd green glow coming from the place where its eyes should be.
“Yes, Master?” asks an emotionless voice disturbingly like HLM’s in sound.
“Destroy these intruders, clawed angel.”
“Yes, Master.”
The slave steps out of the shadows fully, and the group gasps in surprise. The creature looks almost exactly the same as HLM. She wears rags, while HLM wears jeans, her bikini top and one of Raph’s shirts as a jacket. While HLM’s eyes are black with neon green pupils, the slave’s eyes are pale green with black pupils, and lacking in life. The last major difference between the two is that the slave has huge black-feathered wings while HLM doesn’t. Aside from those differences, the two are disturbingly alike. They have the same claws, bone structure, hair and skin colors, and they even move the same.
Before anyone can say anything, the slave leaps at the closest person, who just happens to be Jae. Her claws rip through the air at high speed, and Jae just barely avoids them.
“Shimmata, love,” he telepaths to Diana, “this is like fighting the Moron when she’s gone berserk! There’s nothing there but blind rage!”
“I can see that! She’s gotta have a weak spot, though!” Diana telepaths back, blocking as many of the claw-strikes flying at her husband with her sword as she can. Husband and wife fight in tandem in the manner of two people so attuned to each other, they know exactly what the other is thinking.
As Jae and Diana battle the winged slave from the front, Raph and HLM attack her from the sides, splitting her attention even more.
The slave slashes furiously with her claws, and strikes out with her wings viciously, not seeming to feel Jae’s and Diana’s swords slicing through her flesh, or Raph's sais ripping through her body, or even HLM’s claws, so similar to her own, tearing through vital tissue. After what seems like an eternity, the slave creature finally weakens enough for an opening to form in her defense, thus allowing Raph to thrust a sai through the side of her neck at an angle to get between the first two vertebrae of her neck, and slice her spinal cord in two.
Surprised, the slave drops to the unforgiving ground limply, effectively paralyzed. As she looks up at the group with dying eyes, they can see the first and last glimmer of a living and thinking being in the depths of them that will ever be seen there; gratitude.
Reunions Index
Chapter Three
Chapter Five