Makita

A few minutes pass, before the male voice drifts in, distant through metal and under the vicious winter wind. "Anything left that the damned 'Gorkas haven't taken?"

"Well," drawls another voice, rasping and phlegmy from too many drinks and too many minor illnesses, "at least the Reds haven't been back yet... Hard to tell."

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Voices carry a long way when everyone around you is dead. Makita freezes and her eyes jerk toward the approaching men.

Not Reds. Not 'Gorkas... Damned scavengers. The city would be better off without them, but her position inside the krawl isn't a very good one for an ambush. She hunkers down, silently drawing a pistol, and waits for them to move on.

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A third voice, deeper and harsh: "Hurry it up then, Koba! There, check out that SPG ahead!" A Red Fleet krawl's self-propelled guns are decent money, if you can scrounge one that's more weapon than scrap.

"Aw, boss!" whines the second. "There's never nothin' in those dead krawls but pasted Reds!"

"Shut yer hole," the boss's voice snarls, "and get over there. Yer worse than a woman."

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There are eight or nine of them out there by Makita's count. In different circumstances she could pick them off one by one, but she's stuck in the krawl. Only one way out, and that means she'd be pinned down if she attacks. Then it's just a single grenade through the hatch.

So she slows her breathing and tightens her grip on her pistol. If they find her she will fight (being taken by scavengers is worse than being taken by the Reds), and if she fights she knows she'll die.

Her empty hand clenches tightly, dirty broken fingernails biting into her palm. She waits for them to move on.

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"Yosef!" the leader directs. "Zuga! Check the other krawls. See if there are any shells left we can sell the 'Gorkas."

The men split up, speculating lazily about the fight as they paw through wreckage. They're closer to Makita's krawl, now, easier to see: a huddle of grimy men in mismatched layers and surplus or stolen clothing from a dozen divisions of the Red military, URRS and Commonwealth alike. Half of the leader's face is melted and seamed hideously, a sure sign of someone who got too close to the killing fire of a skyfurnace's ventral blast. (A sure sign of luck, too: close enough for scars is far enough away for survival.)

For all their filth and missing teeth, though, they're well-armed, and their search is efficient and thorough despite the squabbling.

"Goddamned 'Gorkas must have really pissed 'em off now," grumbles Koba, digging for a roll-up cigarette. "We'll be dodging ventral blasts for a month."

"Shut up, Koba," the boss snaps, which seems to be a well-worn phrase. "And didn't I tell you to get the hell over there and check that SPG?"

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Makita is only half-listening to their words, focusing on tone and volume in an attempt to figure out where each of them are without actually looking. There's not actually enough room in the krawl to hide, and she knows that if anyone actually bothers to look inside that she'll be spotted.

She needs some sort of distraction, or she needs the one assigned to check the krawl she's in to be blind, incompetent, or preferably both.

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Looks like both -- Koba's knocking ashes idly off his cigarette, shouting back and forth with his boss as he inspects the krawl. "This would make a great tractor!" he suggests, to deserved derision.

Koba opens his mostly toothless mouth for a comeback, and then pauses, squinting into the shadows of the wrecked iron innards. "Hey," he calls, leaning nearer. "I think I saw something move in there."

Sorry, Makita. Looks like he's not blind after all.

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Makita's breath freezes in her throat as Koba's face fills the hatch. She hopes that he's blocking enough light to be unable to see her, though she knows that's ridiculous. She doesn't move, not even to close her eyes.

Maybe he'll go away.

He won't.

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"Hey, who's in there?" Koba squints, shading his eyes with a gloved hand for a better view of the krawl's dim interior. "If you're smart, we'll sell you back to your own army! If you're not, well... the other side'll--"

"Oooooh." He drawls the word out, narrowing his faintly bloodshot eyes for a better glimpse. Yes -- yes, he's right. "Wait a minute!"

His creased, grimy face splits into a mostly-toothless grin. "Hello, my darling!"

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The expression on Makita's face is flat. She's not scared, she's seen too much for that. But she's not angry or worried or anything else, really. She's just emotionally exhausted as her fingers tighten around her pistol.

If she moves fast enough she might be able to get out of the krawl before the others pin her down and kill her.

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"Don't be terrified," Koba coaxes. His breath is stale and sour, even in the cold. "Uncle Koba is here. I'll protect you."

Damn it, the girl's squeezed herself far enough in that he can't reach her through this opening. He'll have to climb.

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Makita's head cocks slightly to the side. Something has shifted outside. The other scavengers aren't moving, they're not shifting around the field, they haven't reacted to Koba...

Her hand slips down to grip her father's sickle and her body tenses. If she moves fast enough he won't have time to scream, and if they're distracted then they may not notice.

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"Hey, you bastards!"

The other scavengers have all turned away to stare at something. Koba doesn't care; whatever they've found, his little girl here is much more interesting. "It's payday! Just remember, she's mine first! I don't--"

"Shut up, Koba," Nikola interrupts, fiercely enough to cut through his triumph. "Look!"

Koba looks.

...Oh.

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A Red sorceress stands among them, her arms loose by her sides and long braid and greatcoat whipping in the wind. Her collar is up and she wears gloves, but her throat is exposed to the vicious Bahamut cold. She stands alone, one unarmed woman in the center of a circle of hard men pointing guns; no convoy, no infantry, no guardsman.

She looks like a fool, if one looks swiftly.

If one looks closer, one would see the major's insignia on her coat; the way that her hands are balled into fists, how the cold does not seem to affect her, and, most dangerous of all, the flat, dead look in her eyes; the glint that suggests that she doesn't give a good goddamn what happens here, to her or to anyone else.

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"Good morning, witch."

Ilya Miroshnichenko didn't get to be leader of this crew of scavengers by backing down easily. And he didn't survive the hideous burns whose scars bubble and seam half his face by giving in to a challenge.

Besides, two of his men have guns trained on her, and this is his turf.

"I am thinking," he tells her, "how far the Reds have fallen." The accents of the northern countryside are thick on his tongue, but there's nothing of the farmer in the steel below his deceptively mild tone. "This ambush just a week ago... and now sending out a sorceress alone? No wonder the 'Gorkas are winning the war."

His voice turns flinty, the change abrupt and absolute. "Stay where you are."

Not even a sorceress can dodge a good rain of bullets, and these guns are good Red military issue -- the old kind, built back before the factories were allowed to cut corners. Auto-fire protocols built right in.

"You're ours now."

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Makita's entire body tenses up. A Red witch? Here? Alone?

Koba is distracted, along with the rest of the vultures, so she begins to ease toward the hatch of the krawl. Whatever happens here it's bound to be messy. These men have obviously never dealt with one of the witches before, and they have no idea what they've just grabbed hold of.

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"Listen to me, you filthy son of a bitch," says Maya Antares, cold and glacially calm. "Take your parasites and scavenge somewhere else. I'm here to bury these dead."

Her voice is icy with a barely-contained undercurrent of fury. These men are scavenging; these men are uprooting the dead. Her dead.

She stands, unmoving, under the guns, in front of the remnants of gray buildings' substructures reaching for the sky; bones of concrete and steel, bleaching under the Nokgorkan wind and snow.

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"D'ya hear that, boys?" Ilya's ruined face splits in a broad, nasty grin. "She's here to pray for her fallen comrades." He twists the words into a mincing, parroting mockery.

"Take some advice, little witch. They don't hear you."

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"I'm only going to say this once, thief," says Maya. "Leave now."

One side of her mouth tips upward into an expression that doesn't belong on Maya Antares's face; it is confident, yes, but it borders on cocky, and it is jagged and hungry.

"Or be buried with them."

The wind picks up.

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"Have it your way."

Ilya's remaining eye narrows to an ugly, calculating squint.

"The 'Gorkas pay double for dead witches."

The lift of his gun is signal enough to his men, and fire roars out from all around Maya.

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Maya's autoshield flares up, bullets ricocheting harmlessly off the blood-red squares of light, sparks of white-orange-yellow flying.

"Shields--" she says, activating the offensive portion of her defensive protocol.

The writing on the inside of one square of red light tells her that the protocol integrity is holding steady at 98%; another feeds her the precise location of her foes; another says 'ACQUIRING TARGET.' More numbers and letters scroll past here and there; Maya's eyes flick over them only briefly, only to be certain that she is not missing anything vital.

"Range: First increment. Depth: One-triple-zero. Protocol: Drop."

There is nothing on Maya's face but grim satisfaction as her eyes flash to white and begin to glow.

"Kasting."

Red lines appear in a wide circle around her, on the ground. The earth shakes and begins to rumble ominously; there are cries of fear from the scavengers.

Wandering looters.

Profiteers. They smell war and infest the battlefields, hunting for blood money.

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"Goddamned witches--" someone spits, but nobody answers him. A few of them are still shooting, trying to break through those damned shields -- and she's not supposed to have autoshields that good, most of the newer witches can't manage it, and it's just their luck to get stuck with an officer who knows what she's doing -- with a rain of firepower. Most of them are running.

Trying to, anyway. It's hard to run when the earth splits and drops away under your feet.

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This is as much a favor to the Gorkas as it is to the Fleet, thinks Maya, and the voice in her head is cold and detached.

The ground falls away in specific patterns, under the grid marked out by the red light. It's impressive. It's awe-inspiring, the level of precision shown in this display of power; the frozen ground sheering away at perfect right angles for 1,000 meters down. Men hurtle, screaming, to their deaths, along with tons of ice and snow and pavement and earth. One hits a protruding pipe on the way down, with a loud CLANG! His shriek cuts off abruptly.

Maya stands at the center of it all, on a pedestal of rock and ground barely wide enough for her to stand on, surrounded by a thousand-meter-deep hole.

Damn you, Urik, for protecting me.

The last straggler loses his frantic, clawed grip, and falls, scrabbling for purchase, to his death. With a great groan and creaking clank of metal and thunderous crunch of ground giving way, the shelled-out krawl tips and begins to topple over the edge of the enormous hole.

I should have been here with Alexandra's column a week ago.

Not exterminating parasites after we've lost the battle.

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Makita froze as soon as she spotted the witch. She knew that the idiot scavengers were already dead, and she knew that the witch would go out of her way to kill a 'Gorka if she was spotted. That's just how the Reds were.

It turns out that freezing in place was the wrong choice. The krawl shifts and shudders as the ground drops away. Since the krawl is on the edge of the protokol's effect it doesn't simply fall, but it's sliding toward that 1000 meter drop inexorably. By the time Makita manages to scramble up and out of the hatch the krawl is in free fall.

Despite all that she's lost, Makita doesn't even consider going with it. "Fight until you die", she has been taught. And she isn't dead yet. She plants her feet, legs bunching beneath her as she shifts her weight as she reaches to pull her father's sickle from her belt.

Then she leaps, arm and sickle extended as far as they can go. She knows she can't reach a handhold on her own, but the reach of the sickle is just enough to catch a rusted iron pipe that sticks out from the edge of the hole. With a grunt of exertion she pulls herself up, breathing heavily.

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[ooc: I didn't want that to get too long. So I need someone here (Kyuzo maybe?) to break this up before the letter flutters free, she catches it, and pulls herself up to follow Maya.]

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As the krawl tumbles into the pit behind her with a shriek of metal, Maya lifts a hand. A bridge of rock and pavement roils up out of the ground with the grinding roar of rock, rising higher, higher, higher, until it links her pedestal with solid ground.

Damn you, Urik.

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Makita hangs frozen in place as the witch walks away. Please don't turn around, please don't turn around, please don't turn around.

After a minute or so Makita begins to shift, preparing to pull herself the rest of the way out of the pit, but as she swings her leg up something slips from her pocket.

The letter! She promised! With a desperate twisting motion she swings to hang from the rusted pipe by the fingertips of one hand as her other hand swings the sickle's tip into the fluttering piece of paper.

It catches. It holds.

With a deep, almost relieved, breath, Makita swings her legs up to hook around the pipe and then slowly inches her way back to solid ground. Once there she spends thirty seconds just lying in the snow, clutching the letter to her chest and breathing raggedly.

That was too close.

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Where are you, Alexandra?

Maya pauses halfway across the landbridge.

I would have died in Al'Istaan if not for you.

This time, I'm not leaving. And you're not here to save me.

She stares down into the black of the pit, the wind pushing at her, setting her coat to whipping about her legs. She moves a boot near the edge; a shower of pebbles and small rocks slough off and fall down, down, down, until they can't be seen any longer.

Either I find you, or the Gorkas find me first. Either way.

Maya draws her foot back and walks across the bridge. On ordinary ground, her boots crunch in the hardpacked snow, leaving a trail of steady, perfectly even footprints.

I've seen enough (http://joiningyousoon.livejournal.com/3250.html?thread=35250#t35250) of this world.

She walks into the wind and the twisted, skeletal remains of the city, a lone, upright figure in a long coat.

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Thirty seconds spent lying in the snow recovering. Makita would like to take more, but time's a luxury in Bahamut, and not one she can afford. With one last deep breath she pushes herself to her feet, tucks the letter into her coat, and moves lightly across the snow after the witch leaving almost not trace of her passing.

Makita lets her fingers brush across the pistol in her pocket and her teeth draw back in a predatory snarl. Damn witches. They've taken so much, and now it's time to take some back.

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