Chapter Text
Ishmael bit her nails--well, she would have, if this Identity’s metal gauntlets allowed. It was always like this with every Distortion hunt; throwing themselves heedlessly into the jaws of death until Dante finally came up with a plan.
Don Quixote was knocked to the ground by a jagged blade. As Ishmael moved to cry out her name, those damned gears sprouting out of her started to spin again. A wail rose in her throat, only to be drowned out by the screaming of metal. Ryoshu was long gone; her grinning corpse covered in buckets of red. Heathcliff, expectedly, had gotten himself killed trying to force his way through the gears. Sinclair… the minute they started sprouting out of him, he started flailing and blubbering, and didn’t stop until he managed to cut his own neck.
“It’s a pretty nice feeling if you just go along with it~” Hong Lu mused. “What kind of person did it used to be, I wonder?” Hong Lu, despite having absorbed the most attacks out of anyone, was swaying with the Distortion’s lead in battle-lockstep; unbothered by the mechanical fetters spearing his organs.
“Nice… isn’t the word I’d use,” she managed to stagger out. She’d managed to pick up on the same gist he had--this… thing had tried to get inside her head; pointing her compass in some broken, warped direction. No way in hell could she play along with that as painlessly as Hong Lu did.
CLANG! “Ah--” Speak of the devil. As Hong Lu was knocked prone, the Distortion bore over him with surgical implements in hand. They were clean—too clean. None of the blood she and her friends shed ever stained its damn body. Was there a point to keep struggling against such a hopeless tide? No.
Ishmael started to move anyways. The exact pain she had been afraid of repeating tore through her body with each step. The welling of blood in her eyes; the tripping over her own viscera; with the last of her strength, she powered through them, and shoved Hong Lu aside—just in time for the Distortion’s killing blow to rip through her.
As Ishmael’s rent body lay fading on the ground, her dying consciousness recognized Queequeg’s rope, shorn in two. She instinctively tried to scrabble for the pieces, but her arm didn’t respond. Why?
The answer—her actual mace arm—hit Ishmael in the face a second or two later, and she finally expired.