Liberty and Death, Chapter 75
Chapter 75
Cora mounted the head of the stairs, and flung open the door.
She tried to rush in to Kyra’s rescue, but bounced off of an invisible barrier in the space the door had just occupied.
As she shook off the stars from the impact, she registered the scene in the office.
There were a few piles of smoldering ash, implying that Kyra had some initial luck in her mission, but that had clearly stalled.
The girl stalked in front of a massive desk set in front of the back wall, an unimpressed looking man staring her glare down from behind it.
As Cora watched, Kyra slashed out, karambit burning a blazing trail against a barrier in the air.
Fuck me, panic room inside a panic room with forcefields. This guy knew something like this was coming.
Cora pounded on the barrier in front of her, trying to get Kyra’s attention. These things must be as sound proof as they were her-proof, since she got no reaction until the man’s eyes flicked to her over Kyra’s shoulder.
The girl’s head snapped around, wearing a snarl Cora hadn’t seen for a few days.
Cora raised her hands helplessly, and the scowl shifted to a smirk. Cora really hadn’t planned past getting Kyra’s attention.
[Party Chat Request: Kyra Light]
C: oh, lol right
K: can I fucking help you?
C: thats what I was going to ask!
C: can you get out?
K: …
K: no.
K: Baldy McDeskFuck back there hit some kind of panic button the second I came through the window.
K: didn’t save his flunkies, but now I’m just fucking stuck
C: shit.
K: yeah.
C: uhh….
Cora looked back over the balcony. The fight was going even better than it had been when last she’d checked.
Goddamn, if the women in my world were as willing to grab a baddie’s AK and start murking assholes as Tyrinno’s are, Earth would have been a lot better place.
How effective the eager Irregulars that had been sprung from their cage by one of Hawk’s wild swings was debatable, but they were making up for it by pure volume of fire.
Whiiiiiich was making the people on the other side of the building cower for fear of friendly fire.
[Tina “Hawk” Tagliari added to Party Chat]
C: shit, Hawk, stop your new friends from killing any of the people we’re trying to save
H: awww
H: theyre so cute wit da gunz tho
C: HAWK
H: yeaa yea
Hawk reached down, yanked the rifle out of the nearest woman’s hand, and javilein’d it through the chest of the guy she’d been shooting at. She gave her a shrug of apology, and started rounding up the rest of the weapons, Fern and Renly had the rest of the combatants handled anyway.
[“Trish” added to Party Chat]
C: Kyra’s stuck in the office and some dickhead hit a panic button
C: switch to watching the streets for reinforcements
T: Rog.
C: Hawk, get up here, I need muscles
H: oh i gots muscles
One Hulk-style leap later, the balcony shook with more woman than it had ever been designed to hold.
Nonetheless, it held.
“At your service, Miss Mistress,” Hawk said, with exactly zero of the subservience her words would imply. In fact, Cora had never felt smaller, looking up into that shark-toothed smirk.
“Uh, yeah,” Cora gulped, trying to remember what she’d called the most dangerous woman she’d ever met up here for.
She shook herself, wandering eyes landing on Hawk’s sweat-sheened arms doing nothing to clear her mind, but doing plenty to remind her.
Cora gestured at the doorway.
“Punch this as hard as you can,” she said. It would have been an order, but the thought she could order Hawk to do anything was patently ridiculous.
Hawk looked with bewilderment at the empty doorway Cora had indicated.
“The… air?”
“Huh?” Cora said, mind still wandering from the task at hand. “Oh, no, there’s a forcefield there,” she explained.
She grabbed Hawk’s hand and placed it against the solid air.
When she looked back up at the woman, sharp teeth shone in a smile beneath golden eyes fixed on her.
K: STOP FUCKING FLIRTING AND GET ME OUT OF HERE
H: lolz
H: hold on shortstuff
Hawk’s muscles bulged, and that tattoos on her arms pulsed crimson as she slammed a {Brutal Blow} into the doorway.
The air shimmered and sparked, but remained impossibly solid.
Hawk frowned at it, leaning on her knuckles where they had stopped dead in the air.
She pushed her fist into it, looking for all the world like a gifted child pushing on a pull door.
It was very cute.
[Party Chat opened to all channels]
C: Okay, Preparation H didn’t work, any ideas on how we get our second angriest bitch out of a perdicament?
F: No
F: Cora, these girls look rough.
F: can we escort them back to Luxholme while you sort this shit out?
Shit, once again, how the fuck am I the leader
C: yeah, good idea.
C: Trish, cover them on the way out, Kyra says to expect reinforcements
C: probably hit us, not you, but watch out.
T: Aff.
Woman of few words.
Lysander watched Fern and Emily spring into action, brow furrowed in confusion.
Fuck.
“Hey! Lysander!” Cora yelled across the room. “Get up here, need to see how forcefields do with magic!”
Cora blinked as Lysander strode towards her, covering far more ground with each step than her legs possibly allowed.
A telltale swirl of dust behind her informed Cora that makeshift laserbeams would not be the most creative uses of magic she saw out of Lysander.
A gust carried Lysander up to the balcony, and while she stayed regal and composed, Cora could see the sheen of her brow, and her nostrils flared for breath.
“How much does it take out of you?” Cora asked, and Lysander just shook her head.
“Were you commanding the others telepathically?” Lysander asked, answering Cora’s question with another question.
“Kind of. We’ll have to get you hooked up. Forcefield?”
Lysander stepped forward, laying her hand on the solid air.
“This… isn’t magic,” she said.
“I mean, sufficiently advanced technology, but no,” Cora agreed. “Can you do lightning or anything? It took a Hawk punch, just trying to break it down probably isn’t gonna work.”
“I can…” Lysander answered as the colorless lights in her eyes shifted to dancing sparks of electric blue, “but… what is the mechanism, here?”
“Oh I am the wrong bitch to ask,” Cora laughed.
“Mmm, right,” Lysander chuckled. She took her eyes off of the forcefield, and shifted them to slowly look Hawk up and down.
The big girl preened at the attention, until Lysander laughed.
“I don’t suppose she’s much for that kind of thing either, is she?” Lysander said, returning her attention back to the task at hand.
“The fuck?” Hawk asked, hand reaching out for Lysander.“Gah!”
A spark arced off of Lysander's flawless skin, momentarily illuminating the bones in Hawk’s fingers, and Hawk immediately brought the tip to her mouth, sucking on it like a petulant child.
“Shush,” Lysander scolded, not bothering to look back. “I’m Working.”
HOW DOES SHE PRONOUNCE THE CAPITALS?
I was wondering the same thing…
It looked like she actually was Working, though, as the arcs of static had begun to jump along her skin. Cora could feel the tiny hairs on her arm began to raise from the charge, and Hawk’s mohawk was starting to look reaaaaallll frizzy.
“What are you do–”
A flick of Lysander’s finger, and a stray arc zapped Cora in the lip, silencing her quite effectively.
Her fingers kept twitching, and Cora didn’t think she was imagining the faint trails of light they left. She tried to trace them, to keep them in her mind, but their angles hurt her thoughts.
After a few moments, every line of light that had burned itself into Cora’s retinas flashed in a single dizzying design, the edges of which resolved into a glowing circle in the air in front of Lysander.
The elf framed it with her fingers, and pulled outwards, then stepped through with a self-satisfied ‘hmph!’.
She circled her fingers around her head, the air around the walls of the office seeming to burn away as the forcefield unraveled.
Cora followed the sparking lines of destruction until they met, on the other side of the room, right in front of a bald little man who no longer looked quite so smug.
“Fucking finally!” Kyra groaned, and her hand blurred as a karmbit appeared in the man’s shoulder and knocked him out of his seat.