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The castle town manages to be busy even after dark now – to Izutsumi’s dismay. She was hoping for some quiet places to skulk in. The castle’s walls are feeling too tight, and the people too loud, and the grumpy old men too whiny.
She needs some lone quiet right now. Like she remembers the town being at night, back in earlier times. When she could just creep around all night, everywhere, feel like she owned the place, like she was the only one there. Her private world while people slumbered.
Right now, the town is anything but lonely or quiet, or private. For something that’s been here less time than her and that looked barely like anything but a stupid clump of ancient houses (ones that she has bad memories about anyway, from before they were even here) when it came, it’s just bursting now, even at night. With people. With noise. With everything.
So many people. So many that she has to keep looking where she’s going even now, after dark – and so many that she can’t avoid being looked at, either. Unfamiliar faces passing her, giving her glances, making sudden movement and noises that force her to look at them, too.
This sucks. They’re taking her nice empty streets and turning them into more crowds and mess. Just the things she’s already so leery about. She already knew she wanted nothing to do with this place by day anymore. But now they’re taking over the night, too…
Maybe it’s how the Good King back there in his big rockpile proclaimed that anyone coming here would be welcome to stay and be treated well and all that, “be they human, demihuman or else”, as Izutsumi just barely remembers it. Something something protections and rights. That made all kinds of folk come last year already. Orcs, and kobolds, and whatnot. And of course, humans too, tallmen and half-foots and whatever. And this spring brought even more.
Izutsumi dimly recalls someone trying to tell her how this whole proclamation thing was good for her too. For her benefit, since she’s not entirely normal either (not in those words, but she knows what they meant). As if she needed that. As if she cared if someone doesn’t like her face.
But that doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that the place is turning into a proper town. With an open tavern, and noise, and weird people who she doesn’t know stomping around, not respecting the fact the night is supposed to be for her.
What matters is that all that is just ruining her good thing, right now.
The whole thing puts her on edge. Every stranger that crosses her path makes her tense just a bit, makes many parts of her so cagey. The training. And her instincts. And the lessons only life can beat into you about people. Makes her think she should just go back to the castle and find some place to hang there.
But then, that training, and those instincts, and the lessons are for a different time and place. People keep telling her this is a nice place now. And… maybe it is. It’s true that she hasn’t had to do much. Even if she’s really not that impressed with the idea of just settling down, when she thinks about it, this place is decent enough. And a lot less painful than any other she knows.
And she’s not about to back down from all these people stealing her nice darkness, anyway. It’s hers. Besides, if she tried to actually do anything worthwhile in the castle after dark, she’d get so many people whining over how everyone wants to sleep, and how she should too.
She knows a good quiet nook around here anyway. A good roof that’s tall and flat and all. Away from eyes and ears. She’ll just climb up there. Then she will be the one doing all the staring, down below, and none of the getting-stared-at. And then it might even be interesting.
Izutsumi avoids running into yet another person stomping down the street and bites back the need to tell him where he should go stomping with his noisy big feet. She rounds a corner, towards the alley that’ll make for a good climbing spot to the roofs.
She almost runs into a big shape. A man-shape.
The beastkin tenses and hunches just a little. There’s a big man just standing there, staring, like he’s waiting for her. The darkness doesn’t hide his face, not from her, but that doesn’t really help either, since she has no idea who this is.
Except trouble. This one’s trouble. He’s got the scars, and the muscle, and the look to prove it. One killer to another, she can tell he’s done it, and he’s done it more than once.
Even if she hasn’t lately had to think of herself as a killer all that much.
“Hey there, girl”, the man says, voice like smelly gravel. No surprise at all, doesn’t even take any time to look her over, like he really was waiting for her.
Most things in Izutsumi’s head are telling her to just leg it. She doesn’t know this one. She doesn’t give a toss about what he wants. Back when it was… a different her, she would already be bolting away. But all that, all those things in her head, are for that different her. Not for here. The nicer place.
And the thing the man pulls out manages to distract her for just a bit, anyway.
“Sorry, I’m new here. Looking for someone. Does this look familiar?” he says. He’s got a smudged, crumpled drawing in hand.
Izutsumi’s eyes latch onto it for just a moment. And even for her eyes, the darkness and the messy picture manage to make it difficult enough to make out that she squints and leans a bit closer.
“No. That’s a crap picture anyway”, she tells him. And tenses.
There’s something. Something that the different her is already screaming about, somewhere deep down inside her. Something that’s not part of a nicer place at all. Something that started happening as soon as she looked at the paper.
Her senses picked it all up immediately. Of course they did. Picked out the steps coming from behind. Picked out them coming closer. The rustle. All that. There’s no noise here she wouldn’t notice. But her instincts, her training, and all the lessons… those all take a moment longer. Takes them just a bit to climb out from under the nicer place.
Long enough that she looks at the picture and thinks about it for just a heartbeat.
And it’s only after that heartbeat that the trained, honed instinct in her looks at what the hell all that her ears heard actually is.
Heard the steps coming closer.
Heard the sharper step, the lunge.
Heard the rustle of something getting pulled and lifted.
And heard the swing of something heavy.
She must be an idiot, to get blindsided. Her training and her instincts should mean that it’s just not possible. And it wouldn’t be, not when she actually listened to those instead of being an idiot girl who hasn’t cared about that for a good bit. Who’s lazed around and done whatever she wants and eaten nice warm meals and slept in a nice warm bed with someone even nicer and warmer.
She’s getting soft. Getting on the easy life.
Not that she has time to worry about that. The training kicks in to save her idiot life. Faithful even when she’s let it all down. The only part of her worth a damn.
She ducks, tries to dodge to the side without turning. But it’s a heartbeat late. She’s still fast, faster than anyone, everyone. But not fast enough.
The truncheon comes down, and manages to clip her just a bit, just to the side of the head. Just a graze. It’s far from the line that it was drawing, square into the back of her skull.
It’s still enough to make everything explode into a white, blinding pain. Enough to jar her brain all mashed and send her sprawling.
She screeches and scrabbles. The ground’s coming to meet her, but she’s already swinging, a mess of fangs and claws. Only, it’s all a mess, her head too. No idea where she needs to put all that.
Not even when the huge hands of a huge man grab her by the neck and arm and pull her off her feet and swing her down the alley. Not even when the two other men, the one with the club and a third, rush after him.
Izutsumi hits something. It’s solid like the ground. Smashes her skull even worse. Except the way she falls again tells her it’s a wall that she’s been thrown into, and the ground comes only after she slumps a moment later.
It’s all pain-fire and bright stars in her eyes. The ground is wheeling around. She lies there, crumpled into a dazed pile of numb limbs and hurt. Hanging on mostly because she’s too stupid to go out and make this easy. Down, but not quite out.
Even now her training clues her in on the fact that the idiots don’t realize that. They’d be stomping her flat otherwise.
She should be getting up. Taking that opening. Pushing up, screeching, fighting. Like she’s trained. Always finish it, even if it kills you. Instead, she… tries to curl up. Head hurts. Everything hurts. In this place where she’s managed to learn that it’s okay to hurt, and to show it too. Training falters.
For all the instincts screaming at her, the soft little girl is too dazed to hear much any of that, much less actually move. But just barely, as she tries to make enough sense of her tangled limbs to do even the curling up, her ears pick up just the tiniest bits of words from three mouths, somewhere in the pain-haze.
“Get the rope…”
“… They’ll pay well…”
“Out of here by morning…”
“This place’s good pickings.”
“… slave?”
“Nah, a wizard will pay way…”
“… this freak.”
-
Her head’s all reeling. Her brain’s jarred and smashed. The human part of her, the girl, the one that’s had such a good time here, is barely hanging onto any of this anymore. It doesn’t even want to. Wants to give in and stop hurting. But… it’s not the only part in her. Not the only thing in her.
There’s more than just a whimpering, hurting girl inside her. Much more. There’s a beast. There’s a killer. There are things that her brain is just keeping down and dulling.
There’s so much anger.
Things she thought she could make go away, all of them. Thought that she’d make do just fine like she is, without the nastier things from a nastier time and place. But now… the girl hasn’t got crap for any of this, she doesn’t know what to do. The only thing in her smashed mind is wanting to go back home and hurt less.
She’s useless now. And she’s weak. The other parts… aren’t. And they’re not about to curl up and watch as she gets snatched to some wizard to get mutilated into something even worse than she is now.
The bigger, better, sharper parts shove the whimpering girl out of the way. Stomp on it some when it dares to whine that they should stay down and not get hurt worse. None of that now. None of the nice thinking thing that’s pretending it’s all of her. It’s like the brains: useless and in pieces. And it can go like the brains: to hell, for the pathetic and useless thing it is.
Now it’s her. The older one. And now it’s it. The beast. Now it’s the real bits of her that are good for something.
And they know just what this is.
All of that comes so easy when her head-meat is mashed up like this. The brain’s only in the way. Now it’s anger pouring into her skull, melting the brain away. She doesn’t need it to know the only thing worth knowing now.
Slaves, and ropes, and wizards. These idiots are so wrong. Won’t be any of that. It’s going to be blood now.
She jerks and twists. Tears her hands away from her head, and forces one to slap against the wall. Grabs the wall. Pain tries to take her down before she’s even up. But that’s not the point now.
She’s clipped now. They got her good, too. Going to put her down next. So now it doesn’t matter anymore if it hurts. Now it’s going to get ugly.
Either all of these die, or she dies. The simplest thing. The one she was made to do and trained to do better.
-
“Shit, it’s moving!”
They’re smartening up. But so’s Izutsumi. And if she’s not out, she not going to stay down either…
She still doesn’t know which way is up, and her mouth is filling with bile. But she’s going to get up. She doesn’t need to know anything other than that.
Up. Dead or up. Pick.
Arms work. There’s a wall. That’s all she needs. So simple when there’s no whimpering over some pain or cracked heads.
And maybe she doesn’t feel her legs. But the horrible lurching feeling tells her they’re pushing her up and making her want to vomit all the more for it.
She tears herself up, claws scratching on stone. Flails a hand around. She needs a moment, a grip. Something.
She can’t see. She needs to…
“Grab it! Grab it!”
Something big smashes into Izutsumi, hard. A man. Tackles her into the wall again, with the full weight of a shoulder behind it. Whatever was in her mouth goes out with all the air from her.
The crush takes her out of the fight. The pop of a snapping rib smashes her right back into the middle of it. More hot, real, good pain jolting her back. Body’s still moving, so move it.
Find it.
The man grabs her by neck and hair and shouts something that just tortures her brain some more. Tries to wrench her head down.
There it is.
She growls like feral. She stomps down, lashes a clawed hand out. She doesn’t need to see, or hear, or know which way is up. There’s arms on her. She knows that there’s a head between arms…
In a blink her hand grazes the face… and latches on. She curls her fingers against the face and the skull and she rips.
She doesn’t need to make any sense of anything to feel the thumb punching into an eye, and the four claws digging into a head.
The scream is a horrible booming warble in her dazed ears.
Resistance. He’s trying to grab her hand. Claws stuck on bone. She hangs on like drowning. Won’t let go. Won’t go down. Kill or die.
She growls and she tears, wrenches her hand free through all that. She smells the blood. She feels it spraying.
The hands go away. Body staggers back and off of her, screaming all the way.
She springs up, hand dripping meat. There’s such a smell of blood, hers and the man’s. It makes the girl, stomped down, whimper a bit more. But it clears her head a tiny bit. Enough that the pain-bright blind haze gives way to shapes.
The shape of the man stumbling away.
The shape on another coming at her, hand raised. Already on her. The club’s coming for seconds on her skull…
The girl is trying to shout something about dodging and ducking and running. Need to get out now.
The killer part of her tells her she won’t make it out of the way, so she doesn’t even try.
She sways to the side, just enough to get the head out of the way. Can’t waste time. She’s going for kills; she doesn’t need all of her for to kill all of them.
The club crushes her shoulder in at the same moment she thrusts the other arm out – and in. She punches a knife-hand strike, with fingers toughened by inhuman training and claws to match, into a man too hung on smashing her to even see it coming. Into a throat. The movement is muscle memory, but she drives it with a shriek and hate. Hate for them and her own idiot head getting her into any of this.
She barely feels the shoulder caving. Her world is all in the gurgle from the man, and the way she feels the clawed fingers punch clean into flesh. She twists and tears, takes out all of it. Artery, windpipe, everything. Clean kill. She knows this. The killer knows this.
The beast knows it won’t be the last.
The man falls. So does her arm. They’re both limp and dead. But she’s not. She’s up.
And so’s the man already rushing in from behind the dead one. The biggest one.
One more.
She tenses, legs spring for a leap – and the man’s leg springs up with a full running kick into her guts. Couldn’t see it. Still half-blind.
She’s driven into the wall. Folds over. Goes dark for a second.
She’d fall down, but the huge hands manage to grab her by the throat faster than she can do that.
“Idiot! Come back! Help me!” The rancid breath hits her face even through the blood-stink.
No help for the man. Has to do it himself. He hefts hard. Tears her off her feet, into the air. The fingers press into her throat.
Her legs dangle. Eyes bulge. Windpipe crushing, jaw wrenched. But the air going out wakes every part of her back into it. And they’re still angry.
The killer’s sneering. Idiot. He should be pounding her skull some more right now with those huge fists. She’d crumple so fast. But he’s trying to throttle her. She’s got seconds more this way.
She’s not down, so she’s not out. And if she’s not out, she’s killing until she is.
She growls without a voice and drives a leg into the man’s guts once, twice, three times. Nothing. Too strong, can’t get a good one in. But she’s still got a whole arm left, too. And she’s got this.
Even the idiot girl isn’t enough of an idiot to skip the knives.
The knife under her shirt is in her hand before the man even sees it. He feels it, though. One, two, three times. The hand moves faster than her brain ever could. Tears through the wrist, and gouges the elbow, and buries into the shoulder. So desperate-fast one end of the arm barely spurts before the other. Three sprays of hot and red on them both.
The man screams. The arm drops. Too strong though. Doesn’t let go. Shakes her with the other fist. The knife slips from her fingers before she can get it out from bone.
The fist smashes her back into the wall. She curls, protects her head, gives up on the back. Her spine smashes against stone.
Sparks go through her head. Back crunches. Not broken though. Legs still kicking.
Just a bit of air gets into her, too. More seconds. More life into her half-dead body.
She snarls and reaches for the white, hateful eyes in that ugly face. But the arm’s too long. Can’t reach. She claws at it and gnashes.
He groans and roars and shakes her, pulls her to smash her again. He’s going to crack her this time.
She’s not going to have that. The killer won’t take that. The killer knows what to do.
Stop flailing. Break the body.
She squeezes the wrist hard, latches onto it with her one hand. Locks fingers on it. Drives her thumb into a nerve, into the veins, into the joint. Drives the claws in for a death grip, to press more.
The man lets out an agony noise. Hand slips off slowly, fighting for it. And losing. She slams her foot into his guts again to get clear.
Izutsumi hits the ground, feet-first. Legs lurch, about to give out. She growls and stomps.
No falling. Killing.
She jerks and pushes her knees out. Forces a kick from her limp legs against the ground and pounces. She hits the man square in the chest. Grabs on, drives her forehead into a nose.
The hit makes her smashed skull throw bloody sparks of agony into her brain. Like hot nails. The burst of blood from the smashed nose onto her face drives those right back. Drives her forward.
The beast smells the blood. It smells a kill. She rides it all the way.
He’s still trying to grab her, smash her, whatever. The beast gets angrier. He won’t take this away from her. From it.
She screeches and drives her fangs into the mashed face. The crushed nose crunches between teeth. She latches and shakes.
The man shrieks. She slams a claw-palm into the skull. One, two, three times. Like punching nails into bone.
He trips and falls on a corpse. She sprawls on top of him, goes down like a beast latched onto a kill. She doesn’t let go of the bite. Not until the teeth are through.
Her head jerks back when the nose comes loose. Blood and noise come out of the face. Shrieks and groans.
Mouth full of meat and blood, she slams claws into the whimper-noise hole in the torn face again and again. Mauls the man. Going to shut it all up.
She’s getting air now, fanning the frenzy. Clearing the haze enough to see the knife still sticking out of the shoulder.
Always finish the kill. Always.
She tears the blade out in a blink. It moves so easily, still fast, still strong, still a killer. One, two, three, four times. Throat, chest, throat, chest. First to slow down. Then to make sure.
Wrench the throat open. Twist the heart, split it.
The gurgle’s familiar and sweet for the killer-beast ears. She presses down on the knife, full-body, drives it in, until there’s no noise. No movement, nothing.
Izutsumi whips her head about. Two dead, no third. Not even screams.
Tensed, latched fingers don’t want to let go of the knife. Has to force her hand off it.
It’s quiet, except for her own panting and growling. All done. Killer’s done. The beast is done. And so is she.
She spits out the mangled, ruined nose. And the blood. It’s not all just his.
Her still-living arm falls down limp like the dead one. Head lurches. The tight-wound tension comes undone. She sways.
Rage goes quickly, leaks out of a broken body. Izutsumi shivers from the adrenaline and the pain.
Frenzy’s fading. No feverish panic-anger and quick kill-twitches for her anymore. No fight driving her to ignore the hurt.
The killer and the beast step back. Nothing to do here anymore. They let the girl back up to deal with the mess. Her mess.
Back to thinking. Brain gets to step back in, but it’s all smashed. It’s slowing down. It’s got a ruined mess of a body to work with, and nothing to go on with.
The trained killer part of her takes stock, idly. One shoulder crushed. Head leaking. Spine mangled. Throat mashed. Ribs… don’t even bother trying to make sense of that mess.
Internals… doesn’t matter. She’s down anyway.
She straddles the body of the man emptying out under her. Stays upright out of sheer feral tenacity. But it’s getting dark and cold.
Got them, though. Always finish it. A ninja’s life is secondary. Maizuru would be proud. But she doesn’t give a crap. She knows what this was about. Even the idiot girl knows.
Nobody’s going to put her in ropes alive.
Izutsumi thinks about passing out. But then the shouting and the running hits her ears. People coming here. And there’s the anger again. Kicks the pain right down. Izutsumi goes over too, sprawls onto the body, before forcing herself back up.
Doesn’t matter if she’s dying, more people means it’s not over.
She tears out the knife from a heart turned meat and springs up. Has to stagger to not fall over again.
There’s men. Multiple. Running at her. She tenses for the pounce, for the kills. She doesn’t even think if she can. She will.
Prove me wrong.
Except…
Brain whimpers just a little bit, says it’s not that anymore. She knows the men. Not these men, but this kind. It’s guards. Watchmen. They just stare.
They try to shout something. Ask something.
Maybe she’d tell them to do something, or why the walls are painted red. Why there’s bits of flesh in her teeth and claws. Maybe she’d even care what they’re saying. But words don’t really work any more. Not out of her mouth, or in her ears.
They try to come closer. She shakes the knife, growls. Nobody gets to touch her. Nobody gets to come close.
She takes a step to get past them. She’s going to go now. Go home.
Except her feet don’t follow. The ground comes up to meet her a final time.
Shit.
-
Izutsumi wakes up back in the castle, in a bed, so full of healing magic that she’s going to ache for a month straight. Which is just about the nicest thing imaginable, considering.
Slave hunters, they tell her. The human vermin that’s getting attracted by all the demihumans and easy pickings around here. Those are free game for selling in many places. Not people by most laws.
This wasn’t the first time. Probably won’t be the last either. Laios is promising to increase patrols; won’t tolerate this.
Good job, they tell her. She got two. The guards got the third one. And now it’s all okay again. Everything’s alright.
Izutsumi knows it isn’t. She doesn’t care about how many she got, or even for the fact that her hands are going to be shaking for who knows how long from lingering damage.
What Izutsumi cares for is that she knows something new now. She knows that that she’s in danger.
Suddenly, that proclamation from Laios doesn’t seem so whatever anymore. “Human, demihuman, or else…”
They tried to tell her it was important, the proclamation. Tried to tell her that she’s not the “human” in that. She’s the “else.” She didn’t care.
And they will take either demihumans… or else. Both are just fine. Out there, she’s not a beast. She’s prey.
She didn’t care before. Now she cares. Because now… now it’s a cage. All of it.
When she was a little thing, she had a cage. It was small and made of iron and wood.
When she was a bit older, a kid, the cage was larger and made of walls and rules and curses and punishments.
There was never supposed to be any cages anymore. All free, all whatever she wants to be, never caged anymore.
Now it’s all a cage. This place, where she is people, and the world outside, where she isn’t. It’s a cage. Keeps them out and her in.
She knows another thing too. She’s been tricked.
She’s never going to be soft again. Never going to get on the easy life. That was a trick. A fake. Something to make her think it would be nice and fine to let up. Making her drop her guard. Disgusting.
Even that proclamation. Just words. She knows how much that means. Nothing. Meant nothing, already. She knows what works. The killer and the beast knew all along. Knew what an idiot she has been here. Trusting something so soft to stop anything.
She ignored them for a while. Told them it’s okay. And they’re not going to have that a second time.
She’s in a cage, and this time… this time she’s not a helpless little thing. And she’s going to kill anyone that tries to drag her out and take her away.
-
After that spring, it became not uncommon for Izutsumi to go missing for a time and come back looking rougher and cagier and ready for… something. Covered in scrapes and cuts and often hauling some dead thing back with her.
She said she was going out to get monsters for Laios, to get money out of him. Just some pocket money.
But when the scrapes got nastier, and the cuts deeper, and she all the more feral for it, it started to seem like an obsession. As if she was terrified to stay put. As if some need drove her out there, to get wilder and nastier and push against all this as hard as she could.
To get angrier and more frustrated and restless if things slowed down.
Over that year, it became all the more common to see Izutsumi finding more and more reasons to go missing. More and more things she didn’t like. More ways she got into trouble and fights and made herself scarce.
They never understood it. They asked, often. Asked her to stop, too. And she never told them, and she never obliged. Never gave on that.
Never gave even when Marcille started looking worse and worse every time she’d climb back in through her window after being gone for days or weeks, dragged herself home like a wounded beast limping back to its lair, needing more and more tending to afterwards.
She wasn’t going to get fooled again; she would never be free from the cage, no matter how nice the cage now looked. And outside the cage, there are always things that hurt. She wasn’t going to forget that again.
Even if… even if the cage that she thought of every time she found some reason to get mad and get out of there again was much smaller and made of iron and wood. Even if it was only fit to keep a small, scrawny thing in.
She would never be that thing again.