Flowers. Flowers. Flowers. She hisses. She spits. Flowers. Flowers. Flowers. Her Kaeri are making too much noise. They clack their spears together and beat their wings. Fools. They drown out the hunt. And always, everywhere, flowers. Flowers. Flowers. In her eyes, her nose, her mouth. 

XIII drags her tongue across her claws. Long. Wet. Slathering. She slurps the blood noisily off her hand. Flowers. Flowers. Flowers need nectar. Her entire body shivers in pleasure: the simple reminder of the rewards waiting at the end of her work washes everything else away in an instant. She rises, and steam drifts out of the corners of her mouth when she releases a breath. Of course there are flowers. This is a garden. Mother's garden.

Ahhhhhh. It is so wonderful to finally know who you are.

[b]Vasilia and Dolce![/b]

Landing in the middle of a Kaeri Terror Phalanx feels like a mistake, no matter how long you hang in the air and think about it. Underneath your feet is nothing but a stormy sea of feathers, with spears swimming across the surface. They way they prowl, even as agitated as they are, is hypnotizing. Sometimes they splinter off in groups or even individuals and disappear into the tides of bonsai or the ranks of the Alcedi. Sometimes they burst back out, other times they don't, but every plot and counterplot signals a wave of fresh screaming. And you're certain that noise has been engineered out of them. 

But even so, you land. You have four good eyes and two perfect hearts between you, and years of practice working together through stupid and dangerous plans besides. Though it's uncomfortable and dangerous to hide yourselves in the middle of an enemy army like this, it's not even close to the dumbest thing a Starsong Privateer has done and lived to tell about. It's much better to dance down here and deal with them then to ride the grav rail for too long and be the only thing in Bella's sights when she recovers. 

The decision buys the pair of you a moment of peace. Not quiet and solitude, but peace the way a Starsong would understand it: the comfort of knowing that you have a plan, and for once it's working. If this were a time for quips and banter, there might even be room for an 'I told you so' just now.  But you know better. No sound, no smell, no movement that could draw her eyes. 

You are being hunted. And before you can even settle into the pattern of movement, you hear it. You hear [i]her.[/i] The ground vibrates under your feet with erratic timing. If she's stomping her feet then she must be drunk. More likely she's pounding the ground with her fists. A stupid creature, full of nothing but rage. 

She howls, and your blood freezes inside of you. It's a sound that nothing living should be able to make, or at the very least nothing on a smaller scale than one of Poseidon's great children. Human and animal, wounded and proud, guttural and shrill, and so, so loud that it makes your skulls feel like they want to split open rather than contain the sound of it. She howls for what feels like minutes, an eternity maybe, you don't know. You don't want to know. Pain. Everything she does is pain. Everything she has is pain. Everything she [i]is[/i], is pain.

Finally, the noise subsides. When you hear her pound the ground again, she's closer this time. The field of Kaeri cuts both ways though; it's difficult in the extreme to spot her, even in that bulky armor. She stomps and pounds. You run as a pair, on careful quiet feet. To your left, when you hear her coming from the right. To the right, when you hear her circling around from the left. You bump and push Kaeri warriors around so that they stumble into each other and disrupt the flow of their formation so that she can't read your trail by the movement of the owls. Her senses are your weapon.

But the pounding keeps getting closer now. You can't see her. You can't [i]see her[/i]. But you can hear her. She's hissing with every step she takes, a truly disgusting noise. Every breath drags with the sense of maximum exertion you'd expect from somebody who's been running a marathon, and on top of that hers are wet and hacking. She's drooling. Absolutely slathering all over herself, and even through the rain she must be covered in it. In your imagination, it's tinged pink. It must be. You can smell the blood from here, superior nose or no. 

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. To your left. As a pair you dart right, and catch your mistake only just in time. A timely shout from you, Dolce, is all that makes your Vasilia stop in time to avoid getting cut in half. Bella looms in front of you. Her armor makes her look like a titan. She reaches up with both hands to wrench her own head to one side, and the crunch of her joints is so loud it makes you wonder if she's broken her own neck. But she hisses, and steam pours from her mouth. And you realize what it means to be hunted by the Diodekoi. She's been stomping and screaming to disguise the noise of her own movements. She must have crawled around on the ground like a tiger to keep you from spotting her. 

She doesn't pause to gloat or grin. There's no hatred or comprehension in the light of her eyes as she pulls back an arm so her blow will have enough weight behind it to kill both of you at once. Swift and efficient. Intelligent. You've been had. This is where you die. This is where you

Jump!

It doesn't matter which one of you thinks it first. It doesn't matter whose voice is shouting. All that matters is that you do it, together, and once again the pair of you are flying over the battlefield in the nick of time. Bella crouches low on the ground beneath you and comes tearing through the sky with speeds that should be reserved for fully ramped up plovers, but the advantage of Vasilia's weapon and combat style is in its mobility. For all of her power, Bella moves in straight lines and you don't have to. Even in spite of the heroic effort she puts into physically willing herself to stop rising and start falling again, her claws cut only air or a bit of clothing. Close enough that you can feel lethal heat coming off of them, but nothing more than that. 

She leaps again. You pivot, Vasilia. You cling, Dolce. And when you turn, she catches you both. Gods, what is she doing?! You saw her, trailing into the sky above, and then she slashed her claws at nothing and suddenly! You didn't blink. Neither of you could afford to. But she crossed the distance between her overshot charge and your countermove without a single intervening frame of movement. She stands atop your shoulders, and you feel hot foam spatter down on your heads.

"Dis. Trac. Tion." she rumbles, "You. Are. Marked."

You feel it instead of seeing it. You were together, and now you are apart. Vasilia feels the heavy hammer of Bella's heel crash down on her shoulder and she's falling away with nothing but weapons and oaths where once there was a husband. Dolce feels her hand squeeze briefly on his skull and suddenly he's careening in the opposite direction with all the same control of a small cloud caught in a storm wind. 

Bella rises up into the air on unseen wings of wind and power. For a moment, she's alone. She curls down toward the ground, and crashes back down into the battlefield as a comet. But she is still one assassin. And there are two of you.

Which one of you, in this moment, did the brave and stupid thing to make sure it was [i]you[/i] she fell on?