Chapter Text
Kris stands in front of the bunker door, fidgeting with the pencil, dropping it from one hand to the other. They turn in a circle, compulsively checking if anyone might be watching. Nobody – just the shadows of the woods. The force controlling and monitoring them has temporarily passed; they are for this moment physically their own person. Susie has returned to the house and shouldn’t notice Kris having hung back for a few minutes. That gives them about enough time to meet their contact. Kris stares at the bunker door, eyes still stinging a little.
Footsteps sound faintly behind the door, metal striking concrete. As they grow louder, from distant to a few feet away, Kris’s right hand can’t help but drift up to their throat. They pull their hand back to their waist, stuffing it into their pocket. The lock clicks, surprisingly smooth for its disuse. The door, sticking a little on overgrown weeds, slides open from the inside. That armored hand slides out from around it, fingertips scratching little grooves in the door’s metal. The door falls fully open, and she appears.
She stands perfectly straight over Kris’s slump, their line of view halfway up her chest. Her left hand holds her bat over her shoulder, while her right hand dangles half-closed, swinging from side to side. Her plated armor of black crystal stands out against the lesser darkness of the bunker, a dim white glow shining under her visor. Kris finds their eyes drawn to her antlers, spears bursting from her head into the sky. Noelle’s were always rounded and worn down; in the old days, Dess made sure every week to sharpen hers to a knife’s edge. Kris had sometimes found themself staring at them, wondering, if they ran their palm across, how much pressure it would take to slice the palm open and make stripes of white and red.
“Thanks for waiting,” she says. “You did a good job back there.”
Kris nods. They had planned to lure one of the police in with a staged fight. With no opportunity to choreograph or practice, they had agreed to fight basically as they would in a real battle to the death – her suggestion, accepted without protest. Of course, since the idea was to make a scene and not actually to kill, and since there was no reason for the Knight to make things harder on herself than necessary, they were both supposed to hold back a little…
The edge of the TV World. A wasteland of howling snow, their host lying still in a snowdrift. No time to think about him. The Knight stood ahead of them, panting, shoulders rising and falling, holding her bat in fighting stance. Susie, as they had expected, was the first to engage.
“Like hell we’re letting you take her!”
The party fell into formation. Kris’s SOUL decided on the strategy – defend Susie while she charged her magic. They and Ralsei kept in front of Susie as the heroes and the Knight circled each other, diving apart whenever she tapped their shoulders so she could hurl her blast of shining heat. The Knight didn’t look troubled at all – even when the attack hit her head-on, she leaned in, howling as she absorbed it.
Her attacks, meanwhile – flurries of knives tearing through the air, guns firing from a full 360 degrees, beams of darkness which started as invisible cobwebs and expanded into limb-puncturing shafts – were quick, hard to dodge from sheer number, and painful when they hit. The heroes could have borne that easier in a short fight, but with their defensive strategy, the fight became a marathon. Constantly lunging away from spinning blades, falling flat in the rocky snow, dodging to take attacks for Susie, and the wear of constant adrenaline and movement took a toll. Even knowing the fight wasn’t to kill, and they only had to keep going until the police offer arrived, Kris found their vision tunneling down to the next attack as they winced in pain. The rest of the party looked no better, sweat pouring down Susie’s face while Ralsei’s smile locked into a rictus.
Ralsei of course fell first, exploding into fluff as a knife sheared through his chest. Susie kept amazingly calm, trash-talking the Knight even as bullets punched through her limbs. In the end, she was able to deliver one last strike before falling to a gun summoned behind her back.
Kris glanced behind the Knight. The police officer was taking a while, was in fact nowhere in sight, and the Knight was fighting hard as ever. She was still panting, frothing drool falling from her mouthpiece as she growled. They had used up their healing items. No option to help Susie. No option to fall back. Kris raised their sword in aching, bloodied arms, howling as they charged the Knight.
Going head-to-head with her felt surprisingly easy. They had expected to feel at least a little conflicted, especially since they were supposed to hold back, but in the moment they didn’t care They had said in the calm of the bunker that they wouldn’t fight too hard; in the burning cold, their friends lying unconscious behind them, asked to go easy on an enemy whose own version of ‘holding back’ meant not killing them – Kris found themself laughing.
They had fought before, but not like this. Darkners felt insubstantial, like cutting paper; the Knight felt different. Kris had always before dealt real damage to every enemy on every stroke, no matter how heavy their armor looked; the Knight’s armor stopped Kris’s sword as well as swinging against concrete. No matter how hard they swung the sword, even if they leaned in close enough for her spit to land on their face, the most they could do was knock her back. A few strikes in, Kris felt something fall on their foot. They looked down. A small triangle of metal - a shard broken off their sword. Their throat dried; their head felt too heavy to lift. They were going to lose. It didn’t matter, but as they realized it, they felt themself sucking breath through clenched teeth, clinging to their sword, lifting their head and forcing their stinging eyes to focus on one of the gaps in the Knight’s chest armor. If they couldn’t win, they might as well take a risk.
The Knight hadn’t expected Kris to try something so audacious. She planned for Kris to gradually work their way in, parrying attacks until they could get another shot at her armor. Frozen still, she took a vital moment to process as Kris ran directly at her half-crouched, hunched over their sword, sliding on their knees as they reached her. By the time the Knight fully understood, Kris had slid their sword a hand’s length in.
Until that day, Kris’s sword had felt light, like a sketch of a sword. It had never met physical resistance in anything, and they had fought as if conscripted to fight a piñata. During the fight, the sword had felt heavy for the first time, hilt digging into their hand and slipping from their sweat – but they still heaved it up for that thrust, hearing the screech of metal on glass, feeling the sword push through skin like a plastic sheet, slowly cleave through thick, solid flesh, scrape against bone. That moment, the sword felt more real than ever before, and Kris’s grip tightened on the hilt as something, some thick and corrosive feeling, flowed from them through it. They didn’t know what her face looked like under the visor; they had considered that maybe she didn’t still have a face. They imagined her eyes wide, mouth twisting in pain, and their sword sung.
In the next second, the Knight looked down and saw the sword sticking into her. Kris, already looking up, looked into her visor. They made a good guess at eye contact as their grimacing face spread into a smile, and began moving the sword side to side, back and forth in the wound. They made a sound like laughter and like a dog panting. In the second after that, Kris pulled the sword from the Knight’s body, eyes narrowing at its shining white blade. They pushed themself up to their feet and sprang a ways backwards. They were tired and had lost a lot of blood and they were going to lose, but they could hold on for a little while longer.
The Knight seemed from then to drop whatever restraint she had, summoning as many weapons as possible, moving them as fast as possible, hitting as hard as possible. Kris found reaching her much harder, and they couldn’t reach her at all without sacrifice. Usually it was only a knife through the cheek or a bullet in the leg, and they could just push the pain out in a howl – they would get healed soon anyway. In return, Kris fought with absolutely no restraint, tearing their knees open on the rocky ground as they slid into a kneel or grinding against the armor as they rubbed themself up against the Knight, hooking their legs behind hers to keep the sword in a few moments longer. Kris no longer thought about the officer.
Kris didn’t expect it when the Knight, as they knelt at her feet, reached down with both hands and wrapped them around their throat. She wove her fingers around each other behind Kris’s neck, laying her thumbs along their collar, pushing against the soft base of their throat. She stood motionless for a moment as Kris gasped, trying to shove the sword in deeper. Then, her sharp, armored thumbs quickly cut into Kris’s throat, puncturing the voice box. Kris dropped the sword and raised their hands to the Knight’s arms, wrapping their fists around them and trying to pull them away, but they were already far too weak.
Kris knelt in silence.
“Seriously, you did well. I didn’t know you could fight like that.”
Kris clears their throat and focuses on her visor, holding their voice level.
“What are we doing tomorrow?”
“Well, you know the strategy already – we’re killing time until the festival. I’ll set something up to keep your group distracted so they don’t get into the bunker. Just remember the general rule - you end up in any situation where we might lose our cover or our plan might otherwise fail, you contact me as quickly as you can.”
Kris nods. Her voice is deep, grating, but as it had always been. As they remember it, muffled through the ceiling as she practiced upstairs. She never wanted to reveal her songs until they were one hundred percent done, and Kris remembers holding their breath sneaking up to the door, trying to hear a little better.
“I know you’ve put yourself through a lot over this,” she says. “Does it all feel worth-”
Kris nods vigorously, eyes wide.
“…okay. I guess that’s fair with so much riding on this plan. I just wanted to say thank you. It’s nice having someone on the outside to work with. I hope tomorrow goes as well as today did.”
She turns away, heading back into the door. Kris steps forward suddenly, face burning. They straighten up and held their arms wide, face maybe half a foot from her shoulders.
She turns her head and looks down for a moment. She shakes her head slowly and steps away, fully through the door.
“Goodnight, Kris. Go seal the fountain.”
The bunker closes, and they go to seal the fountain.