438: Nail and Olive
Beatrice half-opened her eyes and watched through the gap in her forearms in front of her face how the fiery death ball flew through the implausibly long “living-quarters”, setting on fire and smashing aside any object that was unfortunate enough to be in its path as it rapidly approached the one responsible for the latest massacre.
“Huh?” the young pink-haired hamaxe wielder turned her head to see why the entire ‘living quarters’ suddenly flashed white for a split second and saw a giant ball of molten rock and fire hurling in her direction.
“WUAAAAAHH!!” the girl unleashed a warrior’s battle cry and turned to meet the approaching doom head-on with her giant hammer axe, swinging it around her in an arc as she turned to gain more momentum for her weapon. The bloody white hammer axe formed a tail of its own behind it as it flew through the air: a black mist that grew thicker before the girl disappeared from Beatrice’s view, obstructed by the bright fire.
An explosion akin to a bolt of thunder cracked through the air and Ember’s Doomsday rock sharply changed direction and flew straight for one of the gothic arc windows, crashing through it and leaving a giant hole wider than the window itself as it flew out of the palace, accompanied by the glass and stone it broke in its path.
The original target of the fire magic stood where she was before, breathing heavily as drops of sweat rapidly formed on her face. She was hunched forward, grasping tightly the long handle of her giant hammer that now rested on the cracked marble floor and a barely noticeable lingering layer of black dissipated completely before the last stone fell to the floor from the new hole in the wall.
“Who the hell are you?” the first known survivor of Ember’s lethal spell asked the uninvited guests in between her heavy breaths.
“The one you’re looking for,” a soft voice answered the girl’s question. “That is, one of them is the so-called Beatrice, The Hero That Was Promised, foretold by The Scrolls—”
“Unholy Roasting,” Ember said and unleashed several dark flame bolts straight at the hammer girl while the beastkin still talked, but again the girl proved to have enough awareness and an astonishing strength to dodge the all three bolts of fire by jumping together with her massive hammer.
“—The Savior, according to the man you beheaded, which you would have known had you not done what you did,” the soft voice continued unfazed. “But such an action would be impossible, for if you were the type of person to not foolishly kill the High Priest, you would also be the type of person to not commence in this ill-considered massacre at all.”
Terrified for his life, the surviving man in blue robes attempted to flee from the line of fire and jumped up from the gory puddle he was in but was instantly bludgeoned against the side of his body with a single swing of a giant hammer and thrown aside like a broken doll.
“And again, what an unnecessary action—killing a potential hostage,” the flat, monotone voice emanated from a feminine beastkin with a small frame and barely-alive eyes, who now stood between the pink-haired girl and the three women nailed to a wall opposite of the window wall.
The beastkin was in fact a catkin two furry cat ears were a giveaway. The catkin had olive-colored hair that barely reached the shoulders and wore nice dark suit that looked freshly ironed, without a single wrinkle or a speck of dust.
“Though you might say that you do not know if your opponents would even care for hostages or not, and you might even make a calculated assumption that they don’t, based on the attacks unleashed against you that obviously bore no consideration toward the well-being of the man behind you. But still, your opponents are several. And a strategy that does not work on one of them, might work on another. Divide and conquer, as they say—”
“SHUT UP, NOEL!!” the pink-haired girl screamed threw up a dozen nails that she suddenly pulled out of nowhere and hammered them mid-air, launching the nails like bullets right into the catkin’s melancholic face.
That expression remained unchanged even as all twelve nails flew straight through Noel’s eyes, cheeks, and forehead, and penetrated deep into the wall behind the etherial catkin, barely a foot over the heads of the three remaining survivors of Lucarad’s cult who had their hands nailed to that same wall.
“I’m sorry, Your Higness, but I am not here,” Noel said. “That is, I am ‘here’ where I am, but my ‘here’—”
“Shut it! I know!” the girl interrupted the talkative beastkin.
“‘Highness’?” Beatrice asked.
“Correct!” Noel answered Beatrice’s question and then some. “Her Royal Highness, The Fifth Princess of Larpsus, Annie! And she is the Fifth Princess, for that is the order in which she was pushed out of Her Majesty’s womb, the organ for developing and growing a baby, not sticking your phallic organs into! And though you might say—”