Amaranthine

Normally, Cait took great pleasure in being stared at by beautiful women. That was why it had been so fun for Kennedy to watch her go from proud, to uneasy, to outright uncomfortable while Willow’s eyes burned into her through the entire ride. Kennedy could feel that Cait was basically praying for the APC to get jumped just to break the tension.

The few conversational starters she’d tried had been met with a sharp ‘hush!’ and renewed concentration on the witch’s part as she studied something no-one else in the vehicle could see. For her part, Kennedy had kicked her combat boots up in Cait’s lap and watched her sweat. She’d actually gotten a pretty similar treatment herself, while Cait was fooling around with Lira yesterday, so guilt wasn’t forthcoming.

Willow blinked rapidly, seeming to come back to herself.

“Blyaaaat,” she moaned, slavic accent coming out like it only did when she cursed, “this weave! A thousand earthbound sorcerers working together could not make it! The Waves have made all things possible, but also demonstrated to us how little we knew about the workings of magic. Or they changed the workings of magic, who knows.”

Cait visibly relaxed as Willow’s eyes left her, her fingers stopping the staccato beat they’d kept up on the steel shod toes of Kennedy’s boot for the last hour. Kennedy poked one of those toes into her belly, drawing the girl’s forest greens to her smirk.

“Enjoyed that, huh?” Cait asked, sinking back into the seat, and moving her hand a little higher up on Kennedy’s legs. Kennedy shrugged.

“You don’t feel shame,” she teased, knowing that wasn’t quite true. “Us normals have to take our enjoyment where we can.”

Cait scoffed at Kennedy’s classification of herself as a normal, but whatever her comeback was going to be it was cut off by Willow.

“Cait,” she said, “I’m going to pull you into a soulscape, see if it brings Kennedy along.”

“Wha—” both of the women said, before feeling something Kennedy could only categorize as ‘emotional vertigo’, then having precisely nothing happen. Willow frowned, and the feeling came again, putting Kennedy in real danger of vomiting. The witch’s silver-white eyes focused on Kennedy’s own, and then she fell into them, finding herself in the grey, haunted woods that were beginning to become familiar. Cait popped into existence next to her a moment later.

“Kurva,why does that work, but I can’t pull the big one in herself?” Willow muttered to herself, waving her arm and sending Cait and Kennedy crashing back into their bodies in the APC.

One of Kennedy’s arms flew to her mouth while the other slapped at the driver’s seat, currently occupied by Gwyn.

“Uh oh!” Cait said, “I know that look, Gwyn you gotta pull over if you don’t want this whole APC to smell like goth breakfast.”

Gwyn muttered something unkind under her breath, slamming on the brakes. Kennedy started to slide forward, not having taken the time to buckle herself in, before Cait’s hand grabbed her belt, yanking her out of the vehicle, spinning her around, and holding her hair out of the way as she spilled her guts on the APC’s rear left wheel.

“Grooooooossss,” called Qi as she hopped out, looking around for a convenient tree to find her own relief.

“Blame Willow,” Kennedy gasped, “she just put me through the mental equivalent of two roller coasters back to back.”

“It shouldn’t have been like that!” Willow protested, reddening in embarrassment. “I am sorry, though, Kennedy, I didn’t expect this.”

Kennedy tried to regain a bit of dignity, standing back up and wiping her face. She glared a Willow, but had to accept that, since she’d begun to more fully explore her powers, things had been really weird. Cait was less forgiving.

“Yeah, well, when she’s going green at the gills after the first go, maybe don’t just yank the ripcord on her soul a second time,” the Amazon snarled, hand dropping Kennedy’s hair to rest protectively on her back.

“I didn’t!” Willow protested helplessly. “I was focusing on you! Two souls shouldn’t be able to be linked like this! Emotional bonds do not explain it! And god, for all the sickening levels of affection you display for each other, you’ve been together for what, a month!?”

She threw her hands up in exasperation.

“This defies all established tenets of Animancy!”

“Hmm,” Cait said, smirk telling Kennedy what was coming next before she said it, “Sounds like Bull—”

A tree exploded courtesy of a dragon being smashed through it with meteoric force. Qi slammed into the APC hard enough to rock it back on two wheels.

“Girl can’t even take a piss in peace,” she growled, voice increasingly baritone as she increased in size and armor. The team followed her burning eyes to a familiar, shimmering silver form. A lot of shimmering silver forms.

Kennedy extended her rattled mind to the dragon girl’s, drinking in her rage and power as her body began to shift into the lithe, draconic shape she borrowed from her lover and rival. Scales felt like frission as they pushed through her skin, wrapping her in a hug tighter than Qi could ever give her with her body.

A BOOM! from beside her announced Cait’s brain catching up with her vison as she launched herself into the mass of Ironhides.

Jesus there must be 30 of them, what the fuck? Kennedy thought, mind trained by her mother to stay analytical under pressure. Fortunately, these beasts weren’t facing the same team that had almost been taken down by 3 of them two months ago. A couple dashed past Cait, who was laying about recklessly, clearly doing all she could to disrupt and draw attention while the team’s actual damage dealers got their bearings.

One of them was tackled by Qi, a torrent of flame washing over it as she held it to the ground. The other rushed on all fours towards Kennedy. She grinned, crouching and summoning the staff Gwyn had given her.

She awaited its approach, and it happened. Kennedy had thought she might be imagining it, or that it was just adrenaline or a side effect of a growing link with Qi. She was faster linked with the dragon after all. But as the beast pounced, and the world slowed to a crawl, she felt a brush of a soul that should be long gone.

Kennedy hadn’t retained the speed, at least not all of it, but the insane perception she’d received when she’d borrowed Freeflow’s power had stuck with her, in fits and starts. Cait had complimented her on her kinetic vision after their practice fight, but the fact was, without this little upgrade, Kennedy would’ve taken that exhibition-ending hit a lot earlier.

The monster snarled as it flew towards her, and Kennedy grinned. Feeling like she was moving through jell-o herself, she lined up her spear-tipped tail with its mouth, letting the monster impale itself with its own momentum. It slumped, and the world caught up with itself.

Fuck, would be a lot better if that was at will, but damn useful regardless.

She watched Qi wrench open the jaws of her own opponent, billowing flame into its lungs in a mockery of one of the kisses she could only share with Cait. Then the next one was on Kennedy, and she was fighting.

“Goddammit,” Gwyn cursed, shooting out the back of the APC on a buzzing cloud. “I had tons of perimeter drones! How the fuck did these motherfuckers get through!?”

She whipped out a tendril of ‘bots from her cloud, slamming another Ironhide to the ground. The buzzing appendage began to fizzle and spark against its skin, and Gwyn’s eyes went wide when the beast began to rise, her appendage disintegrating as it moved.

“Fuck that,” Gwyn growled, and her cloud swirled around her into the mech suit she used when things got serious. Then she was hitting motherfuckers with trees, and seemed to have herself well in hand.

Still, 4v30 wasn’t great odds, especially when the 30 were so goddamn hard to take down.

Well, not that hard, Kennedy thought, flicking the blood and gore off of her tail and sneering at the charred corpse of Qi’s victim, still leaking acrid smoke from its mouth. And guess its 28 now.

She felt an empathic tug from Cait, and spun to see her getting absolutely swarmed. To some extent, that had been her goal, but she was quickly approaching the point where she would be immobilized. Kennedy bit her lip, drawing blood with her razor sharp teeth as she focused. She followed that tug, letting more of her power, of Qi’s power, flow along it, into Cait. They hadn’t been able to replicate power sharing in practice, but damn it, if there was ever a time for a breakthrough….

She found the impression of a gentle, ethereal hand guiding her effort. It led her focus along patterns she couldn’t see, avoiding bottlenecks she hadn’t known were there. In her actual sight, she could see Willow sitting on the tailgate of the APC, muttering as her hands seemed to follow those same patterns.

Then, without fanfare, the effort became easy, like she was pouring water into a vase instead of trying to push jelly through a straw, and Cait roared.

Amaranthine scales flashed along her arms as she grew, already starting to rival Qi’s size, and Kennedy watched as she formed a hand into a point, then launched her titanic talons straight through an Ironhide.

That didn’t have to happen many more times for the monsters to begin howling a retreat. Kennedy felt the same jubilant rage well up in Cait that had heralded her pursuit of the errant Ironhide last time they’d clashed, and pulsed warning across their link.

“Cait!” she shouted, “Leave it!”

The woman’s face, crowned now with immense horns, snapped back towards her, green eyes flecked with embers.

Damn, do I look that good right now?

Cait snarled, then made a sound not too dissimilar from a disappointed dog as she watched the beasts lope off into the wilderness. Kennedy approached, patting her right above the base of her new muscular tail.

“Good girl,” she cooed, drawing a much less animalistic glare from Cait. The world began to spin, then she was using Cait’s waist for support as the woman’s tail shrank along with the rest of her. It didn’t feel like passing out, not exactly, she just felt so… tired.

She was vaguely aware of Cait saying something as the big girl scooped her up, carrying her back to the APC.