Liberty and Death, Chapter 50
That scream wasn’t a one-off. More gunshots, more cries. As she ran, Cora fell. Not physically, but into herself, to retrieve someone who could deal with the kind of screams Cora hadn’t heard since Hereditary.
Jane Thick hadn’t just wanted out. She’d forced her way out. Enough shot messengers, enough killed Kings, and the underworld had taken the hint that she wanted to be left alone. Her daughter deserved a mother that came home without smelling like gunsmoke and blood.
Deserved a mother that came home.
16 years later, what happened to her daughter could have happened to anyone. But it didn’t. Snatched out of a club, raped, tortured, and left dead in a ditch.
There would be no law involved in the punishment of this crime, but by the time Jane was through with Boston’s seedy underbelly, the witch trials of nearby Salem looked gentle.
They’d taken her daughter, and they’d stolen her mercy.
Jane was the only role Cora had ever used like this back home. When she’d pulled the trigger to end Lindsay, Jane’s finger had been steady like iron over her own.
She burst around the corner, face to face with a very surprised Link. She didn’t let her momentum cut, instead using it to send a knee slamming into his stomach, doubling the man over around it.
Her off hand drove [Rib Cutter] into the back of his neck, while her other doubletapped a man standing guard over a broken, blood spattered doorway, decorated with slumped corpses that didn’t look like Links. Two baddies who were loading a group of weeping women into the back of a caged cart took lead in the brain before any of these bastards had even realized they were under attack.
A Chain-head elite opened his mouth in an effort to fix that, but all that came out was blood, as he fell to his knees to reveal Kyra behind him, already sliding back into the dirt.
Adding the finishing touch to the tableau was Tanya, shrieking like a banshee as she launched herself like a missile at a new variety of Chain.
The monster she latched onto, using her knives like ice picks on its enormous body, looked a lot like the Chain-heads on about a 1.2 scale. It would have given Hawk a run for her money in the sheer size department. It was also the first of them to really look like a monster.
The Chain-head’s eponymous tattoos covered their bodies, but on these things, they weren’t tattoos. The markings bulged, clinking with each movement, gleaming in the moonlight. These new humanoid monsters had chains inlaid to their very skin.
They also didn’t appear to like getting stabbed any more than the regular person, although they also weren’t quite as effected by it in a life/death sense. The thing roared as its hands chased Tanya around its body, but she’d gone full spider monkey and refused to be grasped.
Another–
Cora did a quick focus, [Chained (III) Level 2]
–another Chained was lunging at Cora, but stumbled when it found a Karambit jammed into its knee joint.
That just left the Links, and a couple Chain-heads, all starting to raise their weapons in Cora’s direction. They found her grinning.
Mowing down waves of faceless mooks was Jane’s bread and butter.
Two in the back were dead before she’d even stepped forward, letting her shield take a hit as she grabbed the closest Link’s outstretched arm. She pulled him close, loosing one shot into the hollow of his chin as she let his body take the rests of his friends’ bullets.
Her slide locked back after a volley sparked off of some kind of shield on a Chain-head, but she just smirked. She kicked her body shield into a Link rushing her, grabbing the 9mil out of its limp hand as it tripped up its soon-to-join-it friend.
She put a bullet into the tripped one's temple, spinning into cover behind a store front. She waited two beats, then dove back out low, rolling and drilling shots into the heads of the two men she'd heard line up there.
The shielded Chain-head popped up again, but Cora magdumped as she charged him, the flare of his own shield blinding him before Cora reached him, burying [Rib Cutter] in his heart.
Man, I like killing riff-raff with you, Jane, Cora thought, on the off chance her most profitable persona could hear her. Feels cool, clinical.
‘Likewise.’
Hmm. Probably not a good thing you talked back.
‘Focus, Cora.’
Right. The goons might be done, but the Chained weren't. Kyra’s was looking rough, the sickly white skin beneath its namesake beginning to char and crisp from repeated shallow cuts that burned it from the inside.
Tanya’s, however, was at best distracted.
The girl shrieked as she stabbed viciously at its neck, but was unable to make any real headway through the thick chain armor protecting its arteries, shallow wounds closing nearly as quickly as they were made. Still, Cora was the last thing on its mind as it tried to bend its overdeveloped musculature to reach her.
Cora flicked the blood off of [Rib Cutter], more for aura points than anything as she strolled up to the struggling behemoth completely unnoticed. She stopped just in front of it, and snapped in its face, [Rib Cutter] already lined up for a jab up into it’s chest.
“Hey, hey!” She said, and the things eyes, which she realized with horror were lidless, finally locked onto her, perpetually wide and wild with pain. Disobeying the instinct to look anywhere but into them, Cora winked instead, giving it a cheeky grin and sent [Rib Cutter] to its grim destination inside its heart. “Keep those eyes on the prize, sugar.”
PRETTY GOOD- 425%
Her long knife cut straight through a stretch of chain armor, and while the monster tried to grab her, its hands lost strength halfway there as its dark, almost black, blood gushed out in waves over her hand. She held the blade in, making damn sure it was dead before she finally took it out.
Cora turned, ready to jump in and help Kyra if she needed it, but her Chained was already ash in the wind, its constituent chains falling to the ground in a pile around a Shimcore. Kyra just gave Cora a wink and a little, ‘yeah, I did that’ shrug.
Cora rolled her eyes, but that landed them on the caged wagon.
The women inside had cowered into the back, clearly unsure if this was a rescue or just a change of ownership. Cora planned to rectify that. Consciously, for the first time, she expanded her aura, letting that watchdog protectiveness fall onto the women as she approached, slow, careful, but all smiles.
That was undercut somewhat by Hawk skidding around the corner and flagging them all with [Bertha]’s barrel.
“Cora! Oh, you’re already done. Start cuttin’?”
“Hold off, Hawk!” Cora called over her shoulder, making gentle calming motions with her hands as she reached the lip of the cart.
“Hey, are any of you hurt? I’m Cora, consider this a rescue, for what it's worth,” she said, trying to find the appropriate expression.
It hadn’t exactly been the first thing she’d taken stock of, but a line of men’s corpses against the wall, none bearing chain tattoos, meant these women had likely lost a lot more than just security tonight. Husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, men must not sell for as much. Or be too much trouble.
None of the women answered, just staring at her in terror, some gazing dead-eyed at lost loved ones.
Fuck this is out of my skillset.
“Okay, hey, you don’t need to tell me anything. You can get out if you want, or we can leave you alone. I don’t…. I don’t really know what happened here, but if you don’t have anywhere to go, you can come with us. We’re strong, and won’t let this happen to you again, just… let me know how we can help,” Cora pleaded. One woman, a young mother, judging from the preteen she held in her arms and her own age, looked like she was about to speak when the girl she was holding broke into open weeping.
Ah, fuck, fuck, uh… Cora searched her repertoire, but she’d pretty consciously stayed away from roles that centered motherhood. She just didn’t like kids.
A tiny hand pushed past her, and Tania crawled into the cart like a dream. She stayed low, cooing as she approached the sobbing girl. Gentle as a kittens meow, she took her cheek, pulling her eyes off the corpse of a young boy her eyes had been locked onto like a black hole.
He shared a devastating amount of her features.
Tania didn’t say anything, just held her gaze, still cooing softly and stroking at the girl’s cheek. It was odd, for all of the blood on her, she looked like nothing so much as a Guardian Angel.
After a few more moments, the girl pulled herself together enough to wail a single word; “Brendan….”
Her tears hadn’t stopped, but they were shared now, and less heavy, as she put buried her face into her mother’s chest and they both let out just the tiniest portion of the grief they’d need to over the coming days.
Behind them, an older woman, eyes no less dead and grim, stared at Cora. Her eyes were familiar though. The same that Kyra and Fern had been wearing the first time Cora saw them. The ones far too dead to still be sad, and numb enough to replace grief with determination. She nodded, and Cora smiled at her gentle as she could muster.
“Can you all walk?” Cora asked, and this time got a few nods. “Great! We’re… well, we’re gonna fill this cart up with some of the badguys and take it home. You’re welcome to ride along if you want, or walk with us, or stay here.”
“Or!” Fern chipped in, jovially brandishing the knife Kyra had loaned her, “you can help us carve these dickheads up! I’ve been lovin’ it!”