Finally the screaming stopped. Everything in the room was dead. Three guards darted around the corner at the end of the hall leading up to the doors. “Hey!” a voice roared then continued in another language. Lilly sighed and stood up, time for more.
She decided to run instead of jump, showing off her speed. As she sped off towards the three guards the doors behind her crashed open. The ghouls were free. Lilly drew the six inch army knife and reached her arm out as she aimed for one of the guards. To the men she was a blur—they panicked, they had less than a second to think. It wasn’t enough. Lilly slashed one in the neck then spun allowing her speed to fling the sixty pound cape into the air. She stabbed the blade into the chest of the man adjacent to the one she just slashed and forced the blade up ripping a large gash in his chest before he to fell. The third man was mauled by the cape that was hurled through the air behind her. He bounced off one of the nearby walls and slumped down, he was lucky he didn’t get caught by the blades at the bottom end.
With the groan the man was thrown against the wall let out Lilly knew she broke several of his bones. She jumped into his face and stopped letting him get a good look at her. “Let’s play a game.” Lilly smiled. Two ghouls sped up beside her but Lilly lifted a hand telling them to stop. She pulled the revolver out of her pocket and discarded the knife into another. She spun the chamber and sucked in the soft clicking.
She jammed the revolver up against the man’s face and said, “I’m going to pull the trigger five times, all you have to do is tell me which chamber to skip. If you live five pulls I won’t kill you.” He was frightened, terrified, she could see it in his face. She wasn’t quite sure if he understood English. Then he held up three fingers. Lilly smiled and pulled the trigger twice. Click, click. She rotated the chamber once and pulled a few more times. Click, click, click. “Hmm.” She murmured and flipped the chamber open. The bullet was in the third one. “Luck’s on your side,” she said as she stood up straight and left the man broken against the wall to take the isle back outside. The two ghouls narrowed in on the defenseless man. A scream blew through the stone hall but was shortly cut off by the distant sound of crunching bone. “Or just very unlucky.” Lilly resolved in a low whisper as she walked casually down the hall spinning the revolver in her hand.
Several bodies scattered this hall, most she didn’t kill. Looked like the first ghoul was doing all the work. Finally Lilly weaved back to the staircase she came down earlier then passed it and out to the sunlight. Before she broke into the rays she flipped the hood back over her head and smashed all her hair down under the cape. She walked up to the sunlight and broke its barrier to peak around the corner. She quickly pulled her head back behind the safety of the stone. It was a large walled in courtyard. The stone walls reached about fifty feet into the air and were swarming with armed guards walking the tops. Two guard towers were an additional twenty feet high on either end of a locked steel door along the far center of the courtyard. Each guard tower had heavy machine guns stationed on top. In the courtyard were at least forty crates lining the walls and well over forty stationed soldiers. If she counted the one’s guarding the exit and the ones on the wall it was almost a hundred guardsmen.
Lilly closed her eyes for a moment and let everything slow around her. She let all the noise around her turn into nothing and concentrated only on her breathing. A minute passed, it was all she could afford. Her eyes snapped hope and she jumped out into the courtyard.
She reappeared mid-air in between two guards spinning in perfect sync for the razor blades of her cape the make contact with an unsuspecting back. She drilled her teeth into the man in front of her and flung her hand up revolver ready and pulled the trigger twice. Click, pop! The man arming the heavy machine gun on the left tower stumbled back and dropped seventy feet to his death. She vanished and the man she bit spun once with the force of her colliding into him before hitting the ground. With the way he moved so violently she may have accidently broken his neck with such force.
Lilly reappeared inside the second guard tower with knife in hand and gun stashed away, she was getting better at teleporting and was somehow able to change what weapons she was holding inside a jump. She simply thought of holding the knife with the gun in her pocket when she rematerialized and it worked. She quickly slashed a back. He was shoved forward over the gun and grabbed it for his life. She pushed the gun over the edge and it crashed down with him and a long chain of fairly large bullets strung like a rope. Lilly cursed under her breath and jumped for the other tower. That gun was still active.
Once on the other side she easily lifted the gun and moved it from its ridge peeking out at the entrance to the ridge overlooking one of the inside walls. She clamped down and pulled the trigger letting the weapon unload on the poor men on top of the wall her tower was on. Several fell in the shower of the bullets and a few more jumped off the wall in panic to their death. She took no hesitation and lifted the gun to relocate it on another ridge point down into the courtyard. She braced herself as return fire blew up at the tower. She ducked behind the safety of the four foot railing and squeezed her finger on the trigger while rotating the gun in hopes of hitting someone in the blind fire.
As she continued to hold the trigger and flail the gun around the ground in the center of the small guard tower dropped, a pistol appeared in its spot followed by a man’s arm. Lilly kicked at the gun causing the aim of the machinegun to weave aimlessly into the air then she flickered into black smoke. She vanished and reappeared in the exact same position so fast it could have been missed in a blink of an eye. With the smoke still surrounding she let go of the machine gun and swung down for the hole. She aimed the gun that was loaded and back in her hand down the hole and pulled the trigger. A crash echoed back up a few seconds later the intruder fell.
With her finger off the trigger and the stationary machinegun not operating Lilly noticed something odd. It was quite, real quite. She could hear a fly humming around the guard tower. They stopped shooting. She was blind too, she didn’t know what it looked like outside. So instead of peeking out she reached her finger for the machinegun and pulled the trigger as she aimed it down into the courtyard.
BOOOM!
Something in the courtyard exploded. This was her chance; she snuck a peek and jumped for the wall on the opposite side. There were still tons of men in the courtyard and many more on the other wall, it looked like her random firing wasn’t very effective, she only managed to kill around five to six of them. A fire roared in the courtyard, one of the crates along the wall exploded and the entire wall on the side she used to be on had collapsed. She had hit ammunition. With her quick glance before she jumped she noticed a man with his head snapped to once side stand up inside the flames. Her ghoul was up.
She was on the other side, away from the flames and heard another large explosion; a second crate went up in flames. Her gun was once again loaded and she glanced down the wall, ten soldiers were barricaded down the wall, all of them where down on their stomachs trying to stay behind a small ledge. Several had guns aimed at the tower she used to be in. They hadn’t even noticed she was right next to them. She held her arm out and aimed the gun down the wall at the first man and pulled the trigger. Pop. Direct headshot, his brains splattered along the stone. This time only her hand and stomach flickered for an instant. Smoke drooled off her hand and chest. She pulled the trigger again this time aimed at the second man, the gun went off again. Her hand and stomach flickered once more. She was learning new tricks dangerously fast. She pulled the trigger a third time. Her hand and stomach flickered again. She left a trail of smoke behind her. She pulled the trigger a fourth time.
Five seconds had passed and her gun went off four times before the men were able to realize what was going on and react. She flickered again and a gun went off, but it wasn’t hers. Lilly’s eyes grew big as she looked down at her leg. Blood ran down it.
She was shot. Pain, it struck her leg and like a volcanic eruption. Pain. PAIN! It hurt, it burned, she couldn’t move her leg, she felt like falling, wanted to fall, she wanted to get out of this place, but couldn’t. She’s felt worse, much worse before. It hurt, anger swelled up in her, her pale face started to redden. She was going to kill them. Kill them all!
She pulled the trigger of the loaded gun before the attacker was able to shoot again. Five seconds. She wasted five seconds trying to recover from the hit. She jumped. At least she thought she did. She kept jumping, faster than ever. She only allowed her left hand to materialize, to appear with the six inch knife ready to strike down any opposition. She felt herself moving down the wall, no, floating down the wall. She approached the first victim in half a second. She didn’t strike him down. She simply appeared with the knife jammed into his throat. She yanked it out and could feel him gag. She couldn’t see through the black clouds that surrounded her, but her controlling aura felt him suffer. She floated to the next victim, struck him down in the same fashion. She continued down the wall, slaughtered everything she saw move. Every human.
Another explosion shuck the very stone of the fort, a third and fourth crate of ammunition went up in flames. Shrapnel from the crates and broken wall flung up at her in the black frenzy. She was struck, wood splinters dug deep into her single exposed hand and her frenzy broke. She sucked in more pain. Everything on the wall had been dead for a while anyways–at this point she was stabbing dead bodies.
She had to retreat. The ghouls could kill any stragglers. She jumped away from the fort. She reappeared a little under half a mile from its entrance. She couldn’t concentrate with the pain in her leg and now the wood jammed into her arm, she couldn’t escape! She had to. Lilly jumped again, this time appearing only slightly further way. She heard a fifth explosion in the distance. The fort was a burning wreck.
She noticed the dirt fling up in several places in front of her, then it hit her. It hit her back right through the chainmail, not once but twice. Bullets, they flung out from the burning castle. She vanished before she could fall, this time there was no smoke, no sound. A single blink—she was gone.
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