paladin problems [freyja]

[Nishaa]

Nishaa found herself looking over the woman - as much as she hated to admit it, she admired the little blonde. She was full of drive and that made Nishaa like her enough to follow her - and somehow in her own Nishaa like way look out for her. If you asked her this though, she would never admit it - she would simply tell you to kindly go **** yourself with your casual accusations of kinship.

No, as much as Freyja was kind of cute - in her innocent damsel kind of way Nishaa admired the idea of her trying to perhaps big herself up in front of Nishaa. She was a tall woman. Dark hair - and onyx orbs, for any onlookers it was scary enough - she was an amazon without the skin colour to match. Freyja seemed to stand up to the woman, and that spoke in volumes to the woman.

Dark orbs finally flicked over to the ginger at Freyja’s side. She raised an eyebrow at her - she could hear that heart beating in her veins. It was tantalizing. With a simply arm raise Nishaa grabbed her raven hair and pushed it up into a ponytail, not even bothered about the crusted blood that was still in her hair - clumping them together.

“Good.” Was her simple response. A smile flashed against her lips as she raised an eyebrow. Looking the redhead over further - she didn’t seemed scared to be in the presence of a vampire, which meant that she must've been used to the company of the dead and that was good enough for the Necromancer. A habit slipped through her lips. “You speak to no one of our kind?” She asked the human. “If you did, that's a very naughty thing to do.” Nishaa knew her face now, she could pick her out in a crowd in a jiffy.

“I never said you could.” She said to the blonde finally, turning her intimidating hues back to Freyja. She nodded her head, she would be trying to go further. It would be nice if she could win, her first victory - on the other hand, she would be happy to gather supplies for the faction if she didn’t win.

She didn’t hesitate she followed the woman at a leisurely pace - she tried to make it so she was aloof, acting like she wasn’t interested. Nishaa had a thought. “If you aimed your gun, a little higher. You’ll get a perfect shot. You’re pretty good with a gun - don’t get me wrong, but it could be so much better.” She shrugged.

“If… you ever want help at all.” She gave the woman her digits which were printed on the card - a maroon coloured owl with two guns were below it. Symbolizing that she was Tytonidae - and proud. “That’s my digits.”

[Freyja]

The corridor wasn’t long. She stepped gingerly over the corpse in the floor, carefully avoiding the pool of blood slowly radiating from the hole in the dead woman’s skull. “Not her.” she sighed, irritated. She ignored the body, then, and turned to make her way down the hall with Bambi and Nishaa both in tow. She turned her head, pushing the stray hair behind her ear to give her attention to the older Necromancer.

Advice.

She was giving her advice.

It was better than being called weak. Hell. She even heard some praise in there. She smirked at that, and kept walking with her. The three of them together were loud. Subtlety was not a forte of a group this large in this kind of surrounding, their footfalls sounding like thunder in the tight walls of the upper floors of the compound. As they stepped into the wide room at the end of the hall, the door loomed in view along the left wall, a pair of Paladins bursting from the corner opposite. Their naked footfalls were almost silent against the wood, the only sound was the pounding of their weight against the floorboards.

The first to reach them was a man, his broad, naked chest mostly bare of ink. He was tall, towering over her as he came down on her like a falling mountain. The fury in those sharp green eyes was palpable. This was a true berserker. His flesh was like tanned leather, stiff and dark. The scalp of his skull was shaved. Smooth skin was marked and tangled with a ruddy black ink that twisted and coiled in some kind of tribal marking across the scalp and down his neck, spreading down his shoulders and arms to end with a sharp, barbed tendril along each finger. She could feel the power in him, the way the ink seemed to shift and move as he charged. His arms moved with a fluid motion, his fist rearing back to come crashing toward her nose. She twisted, just shy of having her face smashed. The blow glanced off her cheek as her knife rose to catch the man in the throat, blade slicing clean through meat and sinew and, most importantly, arterial muscle. Blood erupted from the side of his neck in a gush, a loud, hot splat splashing across the floor behind her as the man rumbled onward toward the human and the Necromancer.

Even the glancing blow had sent a blossom of pain spreading through her face, the cheekbone, she was sure, was broken. A long split left behind in her flesh began to bleed as she wheeled around for the second paladin, this one a woman. She was much shorter than the Danish woman, and shorter still than her partner. Where the man had been a mountain of muscle, hard and unforgiving, she was soft and pale, her body still untrained. Her body hesitated, thick legs tensing as she pushed herself to a stop, green eyes wide with terror as she saw the man’s blood spray across the floor, splashing against the left side of the tall woman’s face.

Dirty blonde strands, straight and soft, floated into her face at the sudden stop. The look in her eyes flicked and changed several times in the next few seconds. The determination was replaced with a pure kind of fear, terror taking over that bright, grey stare. Just as sudden, she was filled with shame, and self-consciousness. Her nakedness had seemed to just dawn on her. She turned, and ran for the doorway that they had just abandoned. Her soft body trembled with fear and exertion as she sprinted for the safety of the next room. Her blade clattered to the floor, forgotten. The Allurist was on her in another heartbeat, long silky soft hair wrapped around her wrist.

The sudden yank of her scalp caused the girl to yelp, fat, clumsy fingers digging into the iron grasp in her hair as she sobbed. Freyja grimaced as she flipped her knife in her hand, and shoved it between the girl’s shoulder blades. A gasp left her lips, blood splashing from her mouth and down her naked chest. The tall woman leaned down to rest her chin on the girl’s bare shoulder. She turned her head, lips brushing against the shell of the girl’s ear as she whispered something soft, beneath the hearing of the others as the girl shuttered and died. Disgusted, Freyja shoved her forward, yanking the knife from her back in the same motion. Blood splashed the air and dotted her face again as the woman’s soft frame smacked into the floor with a slap of flesh against wood, her head bouncing off the hardwood before coming to rest.

In death, the color seemed to drain from the girl, the roses adorning her ribs and hips fading from a vibrant red and pink to some dull shell of the original. The curly, twisting vines of the roses along her back ending in a point just beneath her waist drained to a sort of rotted green. The very plants that lived in ink along her flesh died with her. The Dane lifted a boot and kicked the girl’s hip. “Useless coward. You shame yourself.” she spat, before leaning down to pull a leather thong from around her wrist. It held a coin on the leather strip, a medallion of Saint James. She had a thousand just like it. They didn’t do their previous owners any better than they had the coward.

She turned, to see how the others had fared. She never heard Bambi’s cannon go off, so she knew that even in the face of something terrible like that mountain of man crashing down on her, she had followed her orders. She saw the blonde pushed back against the wall, her platinum hair stained red. A splash of blood coated her from head to waist, and her weapon was unholstered, but unfired. Her eyes, with the eerie white contacts, stared at her master, her expression one of both terror and awe. The face she usually had, when she witnessed her dance with paladins.

She turned to the Necromancer, then. The woman she had worked so hard to impress. She smiled, and took the card she was offered with a bloodstained hand. She saw the owl beneath her number, and the smile withered away.

She’s one of them.

Suddenly, her efforts were internalized. A battle within herself much more terrible than anything the humans here had endured. She grappled with herself, wrestling her conscience and opinion, working to smash them into submission. This group, this Tytonidae had killed her sire in cold blood. They had murdered her for a simple mistake. She understood the why of it. So did her sire. She had accepted her fate graciously, with her head held high. Not like the fat lump of coward in the floor behind her, who had run with her last moments.

If she had been able to accept it, then shouldn’t Freyja be able to do the same?

She pulled the card from the woman’s hands and immediately plucked her phone from her pocket. The smile hadn’t returned, but she had set aside the feelings she had about the woman’s affiliations. She pushed the number into her contacts and glanced back up to the woman. “I don’t know what changed your mind, but…”

The text she sent arrived in the woman’s inbox.

[COMPOSED TEXT]
TO: NISHAA

Thank you, Nishaa.
xoxo

[Nishaa]

There was a touch of silence between the two as Freyja seemed to deep in thought staring at the card in front of her face - the very card that had her Tytonidae owl sigil showing proudly against it. The way Freyja hesitated for a moment - assured Nishaa that the woman knew exactly to which faction she belonged too. She waited calmly for the woman to take the card - or not take it, she didn’t care either way. Wasn’t her problem, she was just doing something that she assumed was a good thing to do - she was being nice, something both Marjani and Every was encouraging her to be - despite the fact that both Micah and Every was dead currently their spirits sitting in the dark depths of that horrible place, she was still here going forward and doing what they wanted her to do - be nice.

The woman took the card then after a moment more, and was typing something into her phone. She watched her - and then her own phone buzzed in her *** pocket. Bony fingers fished into the pocket and withdrew the device. She took the text over from the unknown number - which she assumed was Freyja’s and found herself blinking.

“Erm, there was no need to text me - I mean, I’m right here. I haven’t left yet.” She canted her head to the side watching the woman with an almost ludicrous stare. Unsure how to take the woman. I mean, why text someone when they are right in front of them? She just couldn’t wrap her head around such a thing.

She did take that as her cue to leave though, hoisting the gun over her shoulder she stopped looked at Freyja with a look. “I mean it though, my door is always open if you need a mentor.” She threw the woman a wink and with that headed off to the door to make her way to the fourth floor. She had a raid to win, afterall.

FIN