Kaia the Argent Wing

Something was wrong. There were no monsters around. As we walked down the street towards the metalworking shop, nothing came out to try and kill us. In a way it was a relief, but only because we didn’t have to fight.

“Maybe we’ve killed most of the creatures around here?” Finn mused, fingering the haft of his axe nervously.

Thunder boomed in the distance, and I looked up into the sky. Storm clouds were coming in from the south. Maybe it was the storm that was driving the monsters into hiding?

I saw the flash of lightning this time, and when the thunder hit, it sounded… weird. “Did that thunder sound strange to anyone else?”

“Nah, it sounded normal, why?” the girl firefighter said.

“Huh,” I grunted, and decided to keep listening regardless. My instincts had kept me alive so far, and that thunder was making me twitchy.

The metalworking shop came into view slowly, revealing a large old brick warehouse building that came all the way up to the sidewalk. Behind it was a large scrap yard which was just visible down a small driveway. It was the type of building and setup you saw everywhere in this region. Shit, it probably used to be a factory for some necessary mining machine before the demand for coal began to fall.

“This is the place,” I said, approaching the building with more than a little trepidation. I don’t know why, but I had this tingly sixth sense that something was going to go wrong.

“I’m getting a really bad feeling about this place,” Chloe said, proving that she had her head screwed on straight.

I nodded in agreement and peered through the glass of the front door. “Me too, but the school needs this stuff if it wants to get better weapons. Y'all can stay out here if you like. This is my mission."

"Who gave you this mission, anyway?" someone asked, one of the firefighters who'd barely spoken.

"April. She worked here until yesterday," I replied, actually telling the truth.

"How did she even talk to you when we couldn't," he followed up, much to my annoyance.

I just shrugged and tried the door. It was locked. Damn it.

Stepping back, I lifted my leg and almost casually kicked it open. Chunks of the door frame from around the lock spiralled into the darkness, and I stepped inside.

"Holy fuck," Chloe muttered, and when I turned to shoot her a questioning look, she scowled and glanced away.

Whatever. Inside the door was a reception and waiting room, with a beat up water cooler in the corner, two worn sofas, and a coffee table with magazines older than I was. The front desk was scuffed and dented from years of use, and on top of the counter was a half full jar of jelly beans. My stomach cramped at the sight of them and I instantly crossed the room, grabbed a handful, and shoved them in my mouth. Flavoured sugar had never tasted so damned good.

The others followed my lead, and pretty soon we'd inhaled every single jelly bean. While we silently fixed our blood sugar problems, I eyed the two other doors in the room. One was directly behind the reception desk and slightly ajar.

I walked quietly around the desk and gently pushed it open. My heart sank when I saw the carnage in the small office space. Five dead squirrels were spread across the room, with one burly man dead amongst them. He was smashed, slashed, and disembowelled… while the two middle aged women at the far end of the room had been partially eaten.

Closing the door, I turned away and made for the second door. "Mark the owner and the receptionists down as dead."

I didn’t check to see if the others followed or even acknowledged what I’d said, I just carefully opened the second door and glanced inside. It was the interior of the workshop. The space was massive and could have fit your average suburban home under its roof. Stationary heavy machinery was dotted around the place, organised using a method I didn’t understand. In the centre was a car lift, where a beat up old muscle car was sitting with half of its panelling removed and its engine on a pallet beside it.

Beside that was a whole bunch of parts stacked on a flatbed trolley. I could see the tip of another one poking out from behind a workbench. There had to be more around somewhere too.

Keeping an eye out for an ambush, I walked into the room and did a slow circle, eyeing everything like it might pull a transformer and attack me. There were another two trolleys in the shop hidden in various areas, and I could see the thermal bricks stacked around what appeared to be a very small gas forge. Beside it were two anvils, one small and one large.

“Looks clear, but let me just activate my aura and see if it pisses anything off,” I said while the others filed into the warehouse.

Doing so elicited an intake of breath from a few of their group, and I had to agree with them. In the dim light of the warehouse, my aura bubbled and danced across everything in a beautiful display of light.

“Damn, that’s pretty,” Finn said softly.

I shot him a look, and he shrugged. “What? It’s true.”

The way he was looking at the lights but not me was… was I just being egotistical? It was just weird how he made proper eye contact and smiled and stuff with Kai but when I was Silver… nothing.

The firefighter squad leader didn’t appear all that phased, and said, “Well, it doesn’t look like anything—”

Outside in the yard, something shuddered so violently that it shook the building.

“Oh, fuck!” I leapt for the open side door at a full sprint, calling behind me, “Whatever that is, I am not fighting it in here!”

Shoving the door aside, I leapt up onto a stack of pallets and looked around. My new friends were hot on my heels, and just as I was beginning to think we'd gotten worked up over nothing, the hulk of a car began to move.

The yard itself was a fairly well organised collection of random parts. There was a pile of pipes under a tarpaulin I thought would be useful, for example, and a stack of rusting car wrecks that wouldn't be very useful. Near that stack of cars was a hulk unlike anything I'd ever seen.

It appeared that Mater from the Cars movie had fucked a junker from Mad Max. The hulk belched smoke and revved its engines, but there was nobody behind the wheel.

"I think I had a nightmare like this once, except it was a self-driving tesla," Chloe muttered, and then the hulk transformed.

The hood rose up, the broken headlights blinked, the bull bars twisted up into tusks, and the suspension elongated into legs until we were staring at some sort of rusty car-hulk-boar thing that was very very angry. It pored at the ground, belching black diesel fumes out of its exhaust-tail, then roared and charged right for me.

I jumped to the side, landing on the gravel of the lot with a crunch. I needed to get it pointed away from the others now.

The huge metal beast was coming in with so much momentum that it just slid along the ground rather than making the turn it intended to. The wooden pallets I'd been standing on just seconds before vaporised in a spray of splinters that showered everything for a dozen feet.

"Take the feet out!" The squad leader for the firefighters called to his people, while I flipped my hatchet to be spike-first.

The call from the squad lead caught the boar's attention, and it turned its hood-head in his direction.

"Oh no you don't" I was playing tank now, so I may as well do the job well. Raising my dagger to the sky, I yelled, "Burn!"

Moonlight hammered down into its face like the forge hammer of the gods, heating the metal instantly to glowing and pressing the beast down into the gravel. Rushing forward while it was stunned, I sank the spike of my hatchet into the softly glowing metal and yanked it towards me. I was rewarded with a squeal of pain from the odd monster, and a slight rip bent its hood.

Before it could get jammed in there, I yanked my weapon free and backpedalled out of reach.

"Al'akaisee mon valak!" Chloe yelled. I looked past the monster to see her lob one of her hex bags like a grenade. It bounced off the arched back of the monster, then exploded in a twisting maelstrom of icy wind. Oh, that was good thinking! If I could hit it with more moonlight before it warmed back up again we could do some real damage.

"I'm on cooldown!" I yelled, jumping back as something sprayed past me. The liquid came from the window wipers, but it definitely wasn't soapy water. The thick, black gunk hit the gravel and began to sizzle and pop, melting the very stone itself. Fuck me that was nasty.

Finn lunged in when he saw the opening its pause to spray me had provided and hacked his axe into something down by one knee. Corrosive oil began to leak everywhere from the wound, and he was forced to back up or get burned. Meanwhile, the other firefighters were moving in to take shots at the other legs.

The squad leader got a hit in on one leg, while the woman busted a window in with the point of her axe. The last firefighter wasn't so lucky. As he was coming in to hit a wheel, the boar bucked from the pain of the other blows and caught him in the side with its tusk. The sharpened chrome punched into his gut and he was thrown several feet into the gravel.

Shit!

"Xavier!" the squad leader cried, then, "Chelsea, get him back out of the way!"

The female firefighter rushed to follow orders, while the boar turned its attention around towards Chloe. Fuck. It was time to play the hero again… I just hoped I lived through it.

Leaping higher than I think I'd ever jumped before, I landed on the roof of the boar-mobile and hacked down with an empowered strike into a front window support. Metal sheared apart like sun baked plastic as the heat from my moonlight imbued strike weakened it. A microsecond later the corrosive backlash of my hit caused glass and steel to blister and warp. Whoa…

I didn't have time to stop and admire my work, though. I needed to keep cutting until this tin-can stopped bucking. So that's what I did. Lifting my axe again, I brought it down where my corrosive magic had weakened things and was rewarded for my efforts with a crack as the metal parted.

"Gron miil bar'moliv!" A hex bag bounced across the gravel and disappeared under the beast. Ice ballooned out in a wave, and I saw my opportunity.

Jumping off, I raised my hand and cried, "Burn!" once more to call down my goddess' fury.

Something inside the monster shattered when the scorching heat landed, and as abruptly as the fight had started, it slumped down into the gravel with a hissing death rattle. Holy fuck, that was… a nightmare. Wait, I could heal the wounded firefighter!