Chapter 2: Chapter Two

(2)

She turned to face whoever it was who was so quick with insults. His tone had left no doubt that she would not be putting distance between them, further trimming her options. This road wasn’t completely dead, so perhaps she could stall him long enough--

A flash of darkness against the twilight darted through where she had stood, shaving air as she twisted to the side. The glint of a long blade registered to her senses just before she dove into a squat as it turned and flew through the air over her head. The next instant, a large boot picked her from the ground and left her air behind as it sent her spinning away.

She didn’t know why he paused after that, his pose seemed to suggest he expected some sort of retaliation, but at least it gave her time to get back to her feet. A sword. This guy had a sword. This guy was trying to kill her with a sword.

That whatever he was waiting for didn’t come seemed to just enrage him all the more, and this time she twisted the other way to avoid the vertical swing, then jumped back away from him again to avoid his follow-up rather than drop down to be used as a football again. He thrust and she turned. He slashed and she weaved. It was like literally dancing on a razor’s edge, but she was getting a better picture of him, and that just solidified how little else she could do.

“Defend yourself!” The figure making the demand towered over her, seeming a true giant, though she couldn’t be sure how much of that was her newfound discrepancy between her size and her perspective’s frames of reference.

“I am!” she shouted back at him as if she had every right to be furious he would have the gall to attempt violent murder upon her person rather than terrified and looking for a route to flee.

Two more strikes drove her back again, one taking a strand of hair. The guy was fast, with very little tell in advance of an attack. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed to avoid them so far, but she knew it wasn’t something she could keep up. Each round got a little closer, and she couldn’t shake the impression that was deliberate. “Why aren’t you fighting back?!”

He cleaved for a change, and she dove to the side as it impacted the concrete hard enough to throw chunks of stone after her. “Are you kidding me,” she demanded as she pulled herself from the ground. “Have you looked at yourself? You’re, like, seven feet tall and sporting full-body combat armor! I have a backpack! What do you expect me to do, punch your helmet?!”

He thrust his sword firmly into the asphalt of the street beside him, and in a moment, he was in front of her hauling her off of the ground by her blazer and shirt until the distance between her shoes and the sidewalk measured in feet. She got her arms inside of his and pried, but the armored limbs were like stone. She couldn’t budge them in the slightest no matter how she pushed or tugged against them. She had thought the black plates looked like what soldiers wore, but this close and still, she was reconsidering. As he leaned his head in inches from hers, she realized she still couldn’t see his face within the frames of the helmet, there was just shadow there, and instead of eyes, red coals glowered back at her. “You will not deny me! Transform, thunder witch!”

In the face of helplessness, she felt rage bubbling up inside against this constant badgering, and she set her jaw in fury instead of impotence. All consideration of not offending her aggressor, if it had ever set in her mind, had fled. Her answer was deliberately slow and drawn out, as one speaking to someone stupid. “I. Don’t. Know. What. You’re. Talking. About. Go back to your anime convention and let me go home! I haven’t had a bite to eat all day and I’m way too hungry to care what your malfunction is!”

Little surprise her next sensation was of sailing through the air. She must have cleared the whole intersection before she impacted, catching the corner of the sidewalk hard enough to draw a cry of pain from her lips before she skipped into the air again and connected with another privacy wall. Her thrower moved to retrieve his sword before approaching her once more. “Nariko Kelly,” he stated like a gavel as he approached her. “Who are you and what did you do with the thunder witch?”

He wasn’t calling her by name, he was naming his prey. What did this guy have against her and why did he keep calling her a witch? This was too much. A family was one thing, there had to be one. She couldn’t have come from nowhere. But why did she have a Psycho Ranger stalker with personal beef? Isn’t that something that should have been in some sort of debriefing folder? Don’t forget your admission papers! Oh, and look out for this guy, he really wants you dead, here’s what to do if he corners you!

She was still picking herself up and figuring out which direction her feet were facing, but she felt his frustration with her lack of answering growing palpable, so she found breath to answer anyway. “I can’t say.”

Wrong answer. His boot came up right underneath her, bringing her clear of the ground again, this time she came down on her back. “You will say!”

It took her longer to get the breath in her to answer this time, having to roll over and take several coughing gasps first. “I can’t!” She pounded the bottom of her fist against the ground in impotent frustration. “You want to know who I am? I’ve been trying to say it all day! Not that anyone would believe me if I could, but I wanted to look me up. I want to know what happened, too! I have a family of my own, you know!”

His sword came up under her chin, lifting her face up. “I don’t care about your family, witch. Why did you steal my prey and what did you do with her?”

“You think I know?!” she demanded. Tears were in her eyes, but it was from fury and pain. She was just shouting now, lashing out the only way she could. She’d have shoved the blade away if she wasn’t holding herself up with one arm and holding her side where he’d kicked her with the other. “I can’t even say my own name! I tried writing it, and there was just gibberish! You think I did something with your stupid girlfriend?”

He was silent for a moment, but then the blade lowered slightly from her chin. “No, you’re just a changeling.” The blade dragged along the ground before he lifted it up in preparation to strike, only to pause again. “I should kill you and rid the world of the inferior double.”

She actually spat. She’d thought they only did that in movies, but her mouth was full of fluid and she couldn’t bring herself to bother swallowing. She was pretty sure there was some copper in it. “I obviously can’t do anything to stop you,” was her reply to that. She wasn’t going to be dodging anymore, though she was pretty sure now it was less she was dodging and more that he wasn’t trying to hit her.

The blow didn’t come. “It may be you are in her body, or in killing you, I might destroy my only path to my vengeance.” She didn’t have an answer she could have given him if he even wanted one. Instead, after a moment, the sword lowered a bit out of its ready position. “You will tell me everything you know about how you came to be, and then I will decide your fate.”

She never had the chance to answer. A flash of light splashed down across where he had been standing an instant before he jumped back and both of their gazes went toward the source. A blonde girl in an outfit with too many ribbons and not enough skirt posed on top of the apartment building nearby.

“You’re not laying another hand on her, Da-kun!” Her pigtails trailed her spin as she suddenly changed pose. “Back off or get blinded!”

His grip audibly tightened on his sword. “What did you call me?!”

Instead of answering, she jumped from the third-story roof across ten meters to land in the road across from him, then charged him as more light spilled out of her grip.

Their clashes left the girl on the sidewalk to her own devices, focusing her attention on taking slow, steady breaths until she was sure nothing was too broken to stand. She leaned against the privacy wall even after she got all the way to her feet and turned to watch the ridiculous scene happening in front of her. A magical girl duking it out with a wannabe Sith.

She found herself analyzing the clashes between the two. He was a strong swordsman, but she was only a flashy fighter. The girl definitely had more power behind her blows than a normal human. When a wheel kick knocked the sword away, she could distinctly recall how rock-hard and unmoving the arms holding it had been when holding her aloft. But the girl was expending so much energy in extra movement, relying on an advantage in speed she didn’t really have to try to follow up to keep the man in armor on the back foot. There was no way it was going to last for long. Even interspersing blasts of light only gave the illusion of overrunning him. She could see from her outside perspective what was really happening. The armored man was fighting defensively, not because he had to, but because the magical girl was making it easier to do that than trying to match her aggression. She wasn’t actually challenging his defense, only encouraging him to stay in it while she exhausted herself.

The cuts were few at first, a little nick here, a graze there. Small enough that the girl foolishly ignored them to focus on her attacks. That was her fatal mistake. The more they added up, the more she received. The more she exhausted herself on her aggressive assault, the more she received. Yet the way he slipped them in, she plainly thought she was making more progress than she was losing. The outcome was obvious long before it arrived.

It was like watching an impending train wreck, and as impossible to look away from.

It wasn’t much longer before the magical girl broke off, trying to catch her breath. She noticed she was clutching her arm without registering why, but she didn’t notice that her legs were shaking. That was all the opening the armored man needed, and he lunged forward as he flipped his sword backwards.

Even back on the sidelines, their single-member audience cringed in sympathy as the pommel struck the magical girl across the bridge of her nose.

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The swordsman moved to stand over the magical girl who was sprawled on the asphalt before him. “I respect that you would jump in for another, but it’s meaningless if you have no clue what you are doing. My blood thirsts only for combat against warriors. I have no interest in putting down senseless children.”

On that note, he turned toward his initial target once more, fully turning his back to the magical girl, and for half a heartbeat, she hoped she currently qualified as a senseless child. “I want my answers,” he said instead, “but if I insist on them now, the rest of them won’t be far behind her, and I am loathe to be interrupted again. We’ll settle this matter another time.”

And then, just as suddenly as he’d appeared around that corner, the armored man was gone again, leaving the two girls alone to recover. She went over to the blonde after a moment and knelt down next to her. Her body protested the motion, but not as strongly as it had earlier.

“Hey, you alright?”

“Ugh,” the blonde groaned as she clasped her nose, her voice a bit stuffed for it. “Is it bleeding?”

She glanced to the girl’s gloved hand. “Doesn’t look like it. You might want to put some ice on it, though. And a lot of bandages over the rest of you if you don’t want to ruin your sheets.”

“Ugh,” the girl repeated, “I hate fighting Da-kun …”

“Not really sure you could’ve called that a fight,” she found herself disagreeing, and wasn’t entirely surprised to see the magical girl tense up at those words.

“What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“You are …” she paused, wondering just how to elaborate on it, then just decided to go completely straight with it, “… a terrible fighter. How long have you been doing this?”

Of course, the bristling only got worse, but the magical girl seemed to think the question was facetious. “Well, excuse me, I didn’t exactly see the master warrior contributing much from over on the sidewalk.”

That put a scowl on her face, too. “Yeah, sorry, Sailor V, I was a little busy making sure I didn’t leave any of my ribs behind.”

The blonde sighed judgmentally as she sat up. “Oh, don’t be such a baby, you’ll be fine by morning.”

“I mean, I wasn’t the one clutching my nose, just saying.”

The magical girl shook her head. “I get that you’re in a bad mood for some reason, but that doesn’t mean you get to take it out on me.” She shifted her legs to pull them under her, then turned to look more firmly at the brunette. “So how did Da-kun manage to jump you like that, anyway? It’s not like him to strike from ambush like that.”

Instead of answering that question immediately, she went with, “I don’t think he likes it when you call him that.”

That just made the magical girl grin. “Which is exactly why I keep doing it! I may not be able to beat him in a fight, but I can still get under his skin!” Her expression cut back to serious. “Really, though, what happened?”

The feeling from that morning was coming back. In fact, she was starting to wish for the three strangers back. How much easier it would have been if that was the most ridiculous thing she had to deal with, after all? She had been so ungrateful for what was such a minor thing by comparison. Her life had been rewritten, certain things had to be. But this? What egregious meddling was this? Tying her to such lunatic antics? Homicidal knights? Magical girls? The merry-go-round wasn’t just spinning, it was speeding up, and someone had strapped her to the bars.

“… Riko?” It must have showed on her face, because the blonde girl leaned in toward her in concern.

… As if she didn’t already have more than enough reason to assume the girl knew her personally, reality had to spell it out. Nope. She was not doing this. Nope, nope, nopity nope.

“Wait, where are you going?!”

Without even thinking about it, she’d already gone to her feet and started to leave. Man, that was becoming a bad habit. The magical girl had called out to her in almost exactly the same confusion the man of the house set up as her home had voiced just that morning.

“I, uh,” she fumbled for a moment, then swallowed without looking back at the blonde. “I have to get home.”

She had started forward again, but the magical girl found her feet too quickly and darted ahead of her to cut her off. “Wait, hold on! What’s gotten into you, Riko? You ditch me this morning, you never show at lunch, you leave me on the steps after school?”

At the child’s accusation, she furrowed her brows. “… What am I, your nanny?” she asked before she could even second-guess the words out of her mouth, despite plenty of reasons to do so, not the least of which being her mind reminded her a moment after seeing the magical girl as a child that, once more, she wasn’t any older.

It wouldn’t have even been clear if the girl heard her if her next accusation didn’t jump in volume as if to override it. “And then you stand there and have all that time I bought you to catch your breath, transform and help me, and you spend it watching him smash my face in, then come over and mock me for it! I’m trying to be understanding, but you have to tell me! What have I done to make you so mad at me?!”

The nausea was getting stronger, but unlike that morning, it was mixing with adrenaline this time. What had she done?! Hijacked her whole life and rewrote it to her whims without even the courtesy of warning, that’s what! It didn’t matter that, in truth, the odds of this girl having anything whatsoever with forcing the madness on her were all but nonexistent. She was present, she was handy, she was vaguely connected to the source of her discomfort, she was in her face, and most importantly of all, she wasn’t wearing a helmet. It wasn’t normally behavior she would ever condone, much less take part in, but at that moment, the camel’s back broke and there was no way to take it back.

The only thing more serious than her doubt that the fist she threw across the magical girl’s face did any meaningful physical harm with the way her blonde head only turned with it was how little she cared in that moment. She walked right on past the magical girl, and this time, the girl didn’t follow. She didn’t look back to see why. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to see whatever was happening behind her. It would have been far worse for her than if she had turned and looked at the armored man.

So she kept walking all the way back to her house and never looked back.

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