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"Great," Rika panted, "Just great. Hit Angels."
She still limped, but changed the direction from where she'd been going before. The demon girl instead made a beeline away from the Weaveway. Rika kept going, smoke and fire raining down around her.
"Rat girl! You can't get away from us!" The Angel's voice was louder than before.
Rika tried not to look over her shoulder. Instead she felt the last of her leg wound seal up. She focused her biokinesis a bit more, shifting her legs into something better for running. Becoming digitigrade, she loped at a fast pace.
"What the hell is this package?"
Flames continued to shoot down after her.
"Really? Give up already!"
"DEMON! Face justice from on high!" The voice boomed, closer. It sounded like thunder.
"Riiight. Crazy Golden YABAI a-holes. Awesome."
Rika tried to run faster, but it wasn't tenable. She couldn't run in a straight line. The Angels burned a pattern in the forest in front of them, forcing Rika to have to zigzag. It slowed her down.
Worse, they didn't have the ground and forest impeding them. Rika had changed her legs into running legs, her toes barely touching the ground. But that wasn't as fast as flying through the air above.
Then the route in front of her got worse. Up ahead the forest fires and a crevice outlined a dead end. Between the sudden drop and the encircling fire, Rika didn't have anywhere else to go. In the pit of of her stomach Rika realized, she did have a option.
"Ok, this is going to be dumb, Rika." She admonished herself, then she jumped into the crevice, getting ready for what she thought would be a hard fall...
...but Rika fell down onto something soft and squishy under her. It broke her fall.
Rika couldn't see. The crevice was dark, but it continued downward from her position. She crawled down, holding tight onto the package.
The Angels landed softly outside the crevice. Rika could smell and see the raw flame they brought to bear as they followed her in. Light illuminated the crevice. Rika slide further down into the dark recesses of the crevice, trying to slip into the cracks of the narrowing crevice, trying to squeeze and hide.
"Like a demon to try and claw your way back to the hell you came from," the leader pronounced. The Angel, a blonde man with a brilliant blue halo of flame leapt down onto the same surface that had broken Rika's fall.
His hair was tied into a ponytail. He wore a black suit, with cuff-links that glittered in the fire light. Rika recognized gold when she saw it. A elaborate tattoo started on the part of his hand that was visible to her, winding up until it reached his neck. She couldn't tell more from him, only that he looked like the leader of the three.
The other two followed his lead, landing behind him. They wore the same sort of suit, except they had no gold cufflinks. Instead they wore sunglasses. The taller of the two was a redheaded man, his hair short. His chin had very soft curve to it, with a scare crossing one of his lips. His halo burned yellow.
The last one was the shortest of the three, and she was a redhead too. Her hair had been cut very short as well. She had no makeup, and Rika could tell she didn't need it, not really. She had a scar as well, but it was on her throat. It didn't hurt her looks, only making her look more fierce. Her halo burned in yellow flames as well.
"Oh come on, really?" Rika shook her head. "Can you get any more stereotypically Angel on me here?"
"The package, Demon."
"Or what?" Rika glanced down at what had broken her fall before, and what the Angels were standing on. It wasn't what she expected. She sucked in a breath. "I don't give up packages, company policy, got me? How about you worry about your own package, eh?"
The lead angel blinked at her response. The shorter redhead looked at Rika. She then turned to her leader. "Blake, can't we just burn her and get it over with?"
Blake glared at her, this clearly being a breach of etiquette.
"Yeah Blake, can you just burn her?" Rika's voice mocked him. Blake ignored her.
Rika rolled her eyes, then put her fingers in her ears. She watched as tiny shapes crawled out of what the Angels were standing on. Hundreds of discarded exoskeletons, each the outer shell of something large and vaguely crab-shaped. The tiny shapes looked like tiny larval versions of the same Kaiju.
They were crabs, except inside of a single pair of claws, they had four. A pair of wasp eyes poked out from between the shells of the crab. Its purple shell looked crabish, but bulbous growths on the outside, air sacs, inflating and deflating. Rika waited for it.
There was a reason everyone in Noah called them Screamers. These were just the babies. Airs puffed up, deflated and its mandibles wobbled. It screamed, and the Angels cursed.
Even with her ears plugged with her fingers, Rika could hear it in her brain. The worse part was that it didn't stop right away. It just kept going.
All the Angels fell to their knees, pissed. The crevice rumbled, and Rika felt things moving around her. Screamers poured out of the crevice, surrounding her.
Rika closed her eyes. She tried to imagine what dying here would feel like, and she hoped she could watch Blake and his cronies die with her. Crab food. Her mouth opened before she could stop it.
"Whats the matter Blake?" Rika shouted. She couldn't hear a word she said over the screaming of the Screamers. The smell of burning crab then hit her.
Rika opened her eyes, seeing each of the three Angels wielding weapons comprised of fire and electricity. Screamers swarmed over them, and the Angels just fended them off. Blake moved toward her. Rika shrank.
"Crap."
The next thing, wasn't what she expected. Something grabbed her leg and tugged. And then she was being dragged down and away from Blake, her vision a blur of Screamers rushing, light and a pair of soft hands guiding her.
Then she could hear again.
Rika's eyes stung. She tried to focus, to try and fix on a single sound. Someone was talking to her, here in the dark. Rika tried to listen, failing to do so once. On the second try something clicked and she could hear it.
"...Easy. Just hold my hand. Easy..."
Rika felt her hand gripping tight another hand. She decided to go with the voice. It sounded nice, like her mother's voice. Her mother's voice on days when she was very small and had been crying and needed someone to listen to her. And Rika just trusted that feeling.
"Good... Easy now. Watch your step... and here..."
Then, like a veil being lifted, a woman helped her to her feet. It was no longer in that crevice, but instead was a waterfall under the Blue Dome. The Woman smiled, her face mostly obscured by a robe.
The woman was a heavier build than Rika, but by no means looked overweight. More like the body of a woman who lived and worked in a garden, her body built to kneel, lift and tend to plants around her. With each step the woman took, flowers and plants grew, leaving not footprints but a flowerbed. The woman's voice stopped.
Rika noticed the hardness in the woman's grasp, callouses and hard work over them. The woman smelled like a garden. And Rika felt trust in her. A part of Rika wondered if this was some trick or...
The woman held Rika's hand, and Rika followed her through this glade in the Blue Dome. The waterfall flowed into a small pond and creek around them.
"Rika Reich," the woman said, revealing her face, "Welcome to my turf."
A face with tattooes of spirals, greeted her. A long deathhawk haircut, long and grown into dreadlocks that fell down to her shoulders. A pair of vibrant, green eyes. But her face, Rika realized, wasn't demonic, but Angelic. Not deformed, but one of those blessed with unearthly purity to go with their psychic powers.
"How did you- Oh. You got me with your whammy, didn't you?"
"You were panicking. I didn't like the men Uriel sent into my Turf. My name is Jezebel, and if helping you pisses off Uriel, then by all means help you I shall."
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