"You're getting closer." Jo was walking at a brisk pace as she shoved her way through the stubborn crowd. "You're so close that you're red hot." She could instinctively feel eyes on her. It didn't help that she had left her guns with Leo in her rush to put distance between herself and Meg. The feeling only seemed to intensify with each forward step, each breath and each wave of adrenalin that beat through her system. "Red like Meg's hair." This thing, this person, this whatever it was definitely knew how psychological warfare worked. It definitely knew how to play her and goad her and shake her up. "Red like her fingernail polish." The only thing that was driving her forward, other than her adrenalin was her hatred for this voice and the fact that when she was finally face to face with this thing, she would beat the ever-living crap out of it. "Red like her blood." She was now under an indiscriminate skyscraper, looking up at it and trying to get any visual on her enemy. "Tsk, tsk, you're lukewarm yellow now." Dammit. Where the hell was the bastard hiding? "You keep looking up at the sky. I can tell you right now, I'm no god. But I'm close, so close." "Fucking hell." She swore, right in front of the skyscraper and right in the midst of the pavement, loud enough for the people passing by to give her strange looks. "I'm right behind you." It taunted and Jo swiveled around, anxious and angry to get this fight started. But the only thing she was met with was the infinite crowd of people she had passed on her way here. She was being jumpy and foolish. There was no way this person would be in the crowd. She would have seen them, sensed them, she would have noticed... "Unlike god, when you call out for me, I come." "Then give me a name to call out." She said, desperate for this conflict to come to an end. It was the first time she'd ever felt rattled before a fight. People were ignoring her on the whole, but only a bold few were staring right at her and whispering words that she did not care to hear or know. "I can't do that. Because then the curse will be broken and the Princess will be set free." "Goddamit! Then just come down here you nutjob." She was full out screaming now and the shock of her voice stopped some pedestrians dead in their tracks. "I can't do that." It repeated again, like she hadn't heard it the first time. Jo put her hand over her eyes, trying to stop her anger from making her dizzy. It was one thing that her enemy was close by, it was another annoying ass thing when she couldn't find that enemy and the fucker was taunting her. "I can't do that because...I'm no longer anywhere near you." Jo removed her hand from over her eyes. "What?" "Didn't you know? A god is prohibited from fibbing." It was like this...thing was having a conversation with someone else in her mind and she, the hapless onlooker could only witness this one-sided conversation and attempt to pick at the pieces, the words, like a scab and uncover the problem, the infection, the cure. "Keep in mind that I'm not a god, Jo." "Then why...?" Why the hell did this thing drag her out here? What the fuck was going on? "How fast do you think you can run back to Leo's? Do you think you'll make it in time?" "Make it in time for wha"- And suddenly everything was snapping into place and making sense. Oh dear god, she was such a fool. "You piece of crap, if you even go near-" "But I already have. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it, freak!" Jo stood there shell-shocked, not because of the sudden harsh tone the voice was using, but because this thing, it had known how she would react and it had counted on that reaction. It knew she would blindly run into enemy's territory, into enemy's sights and that when she did, it would strike her unprotected loved ones. "Have fun with the crowd." There was silence on the other end, a bleak silence that further conveyed her defeat and her mental trauma to that defeat. The crowd, also as if in agreement with the silent mockery the voice had imparted on her with its departure was still tightly compact, an almost impenetrable wall of bodies that even with her sudden angry burst of vehement shoving and cursing only parted slowly. If only she could fly. She looked at the arm that had the wing tattoo and wished with all her might that those lines edged into her skin, the flat, curving and outstretching pattern that represented a far off abstraction of human religion and ego, that it would come alive, sprout up from her skin, from the right side of her shoulderand usher her up to the sky. Even if it was only able to produce one feasible wing. She would rather be a one-winged angel than flightless. "Move!" She barked because in reality this was the only thing she could do. She couldn't fly. She wasn't a god. She could only continue to shove her way through the crowd and halt her step due to circumstances not within her control, as the bodies all around her pressed in from all sides. How could the street be so crowded! She'd never seen it so bad. And not just that, but the bodies around her didn't feel soft and vulnerable like the bodies she was used to encountering. They felt sturdy, almost like they were padded down. Almost like they... Someone suddenly pushed her from her blind side. She stumbled into someone else and it felt like she hit a wall. "You should watch where you're going, miss." A man's voice plainly said, and then a hand was clutching her arm and ripping her away and into another direction. The crowd, if it was possible had gotten denser. She could smell something like oil and turbine rich in the air. Like freshly carved out prosthetics parts, rotten blood and the grim from the city streets. Someone hit her on her blind side, right in the ribs and the impact knocked her into another set of hard bodies. Was this what that voice had meant when they'd said to have fun with the crowd? She again felt someone grab onto her hand and squeeze, bone shifting under bone as she wrenched her arm free and kicked the person in front of her to give her enough room to get away. She saw another hand reach out, she heard someone scream out of the circle of bodies she was currently trapped in. She heard more screams and the sound of stampeding feet. So...her enemies had mixed themselves in with the normal crowd. But if she had to guess, they were no longer dispersed, but all around her in this very confined circle they restricted her to, with only a few stragglers scattered around the streets. The scent of them was thick. Normal body replacement parts didn't smell like this. They smelt more of medicine; they smelt more of sterilized plastic and not of gunpowder and blood. She'd always had a good nose for blood. She reeked out of it, so it wasn't hard to figure out who her fellow murderers were in this crowd. The strong smell of industrialized heavy ore and iron, fused with blood and rotten tissue wafted from the circle she was trapped in. The sight of them was normal enough, but she couldn't always trust her eyes. They were misleading, unlike her nose. She grabbed onto a boy with blond hair, his baby face an ideal cover for the blood and guts he reeked off. He let his true colors show when she'd gotten his hand in a lock and started pulling, hearing not the normal pop of dislocated bone, but the grinding away of steel upon bolted joints. He howled and tried to strike at her face with his suddenly sharpened fingernails, but she tossed him and his body intercepted with another assailant. She stumbled back into another body, this one reeking of sweat and drugs. Her arm had collided with his face, her elbow smashing his nose and driving it into his skull as she used his body to barrel through the angry crowd at her back. She let him fall and using the space she had opened for herself, she put her foot back, drove it into the hard concrete under her and boosted forward, plowing her knee into the unlucky bastard in front of her. He went down hard. It was an instantaneous knockout and she used his body as leverage to hop from him and onto the next victim. She'd ended up with her hand smothering his face, her fingers locking around his jaw until she felt blood and heard a crunch. He was falling back and she forward and she let the momentum set her up for a kick, her boot grounding into the temple of another unluckily positioned bastard, watching his face practically cave in from the force, his body suddenly knocking hard into the lamppost to his right. There was blood. A lot of blood and it was all oozing out of the kicked man's head. Strangely though he was getting right back up and she had to watch as he stumbled forward, smearing blood on the person to his left and skidding on his own blood when he stepped into a forming puddle at his feet. She couldn't take her eyes off of him, even though there were more enemies to be dealt with, she could not look away, because this man was clearly missing a part of his head, the somewhat pink, oily gloss of a brain poking out of the ripped flesh. She stared at it entranced, because brain matter always looked much different in real life than in horror flicks. Especially when that brain matter was somewhat pulsing around his wound and glowing. That bright sickly, greenish, white light that made her instantly remember her own personal encounter with this thing. He was limping forward, aggressive as ever and still reaching out for her with his split nails and bloody palms. She could suddenly see the nerves and veins in his face, like he was an anatomical dummy instead of a real, breathing human being. All the blood seemed to have drained away from his face and the veins became more pronounced, a bluish-green hue that was matched by the faint color from the deep gash on the side of his temple. Something like tentacles was slithering all over his face and simultaneously reaching out to her. She took an unconscious step back. Of all the places to run into this thing, why did it have to be now! The man halted in his step, like he had run out of batteries and then he was groaning loudly, painfully, his hands going up to clutch at his head as he tipped back and forth like a drunk. She switched her stance to her strong side, her dominant shoulder in front of her now and the man was suddenly struck out of his daze by the sound of her shoes scuffing the pavement. He ran directly at her and she pulled back and socked him in the face. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. The brain was still moving around and she jumped over him and using that same dominant shoulder she plowed her way through her assailants. It was hard. Her progress still being impeded by the sturdy bodies and their questing hands that almost knew her every move. It was her rotten luck or the smarts of her caller that kept her from taking higher ground. The skyscrapers above her loomed dangerously and unforgiving, and it made her want to curse them for being so sorely out of her reach. When she came out of the circle, she was covered in blood that was not hers and bruises that were. Her shoulders ached, but she knew they would heal by the time she made it to Leo's. She was a fast healer. She was also a fast runner. She could make it. She would make it. She had to make it.
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