Chapter 12
Just Shoot Her!
With so much going on, it was quite difficult for Tomoyo to capture the action. She was used to filming Sakura fight one opponent or spell at a time, and here she was trying to get cinematography of three separate fights at the same time.
All of them could be interesting, of course, but her instincts were to focus on Sakura. As usual. This worked for a while, but the fight against Emerald was highly mobile, and very frustrating to capture on video. Sakura was using Dash and Jump just to stay ahead of the tan-skinned girl, who was pretty quick on her feet. As a result, it was a struggle to keep either of them in-frame.
Tomoyo managed to capture Sakura heroically severing the chain of the other girl's weapon with her sword. But the next moment, they jumped out of the shot once again, this time around a dark corner. Mere seconds later they ran back into view, but with all the dashing between the bushes and burning buildings, the digital videocamera didn't seem to keep up with sudden changes in lighting. Tomoyo, unaware that she could fix it in post, decided to change focus to another, more stationary fight.
Most of the motion of Kerberos' and Yue's battle against the leader of the "cryptozoologist" group involved dodging each other's magical attacks. Because Kerberos and Cinder both favored fire attacks, at least there was plenty of lighting for Tomoyo to record what was happening. As for what was happening, that was kind of hard for her to understand. Sometimes two fireballs would collide in mid-air, but sometimes rays of flame would shoot past each other and both combatants would have to dodge.
Yue fired a volley of ice arrows from his bow, but they were summarily melted in another gout of flame erupting from Cinder's palm. Cinder then retaliated by conjuring dimly glowing blades in mid-air; with a wave of her hand, they flew like missiles to Yue. Kerberos pushed Yue out of the way of a blade at the last minute, but managed to take a glancing blow from one of her daggers. He yelped in pain, but the tough hide of his true form took most of the blow.
Tomoyo had the impression that Clow's two guardian spirits weren't doing too well in their battle against Cinder, so she turned her attention to Shaoran. She wanted her film to focus on heroism, she told herself. But ultimately she was just an eleven year old girl who didn't like seeing her friends get hurt.
Even from halfway down the block, she could tell that she was getting a real martial arts exhibition from Shaoran and his opponent, Mercury. It reminded her of a samurai drama, how they'd stare each other down, then simultaneously spring into action to attack each other. Then it reminded her of Hong Kong cinema, with Shaoran's kung-fu facing against his opponent's capoeira, in a flurry of punches and kicks. If it were a movie, she'd say the two were near evenly matched, which made for a very exciting fight.
Shaoran, in the middle of that fight, did not share Tomoyo's rosy assessment of his combat performance, which he rated as "narrowly avoiding being creamed." Twice already, he had barely managed to raise his arm to avoid taking kicks to the face. The blocks held, but hurt anyway; he was against an adult opponent who obviously was not trying to fight fair.
In that case, Shaoran didn't have to fight fair, either. He retreated, luring Mercury into the vicinity of a burning house, black smoke billowing out the top. When Mercury looked ready to strike, Shaoran pressed a paper card against his sword, calling, "Fukka Shourai!" At his call, a magical gust sent a rush of dark, acrid smoke across Mercury's path.
Between coughs, Mercury cursed through the cloud, "Where the hell are you, brat?"
The answer was, surprisingly enough: directly behind him. Shaoran siezed the opening, and swung his sword at Mercury's legs, only to have the thrust stopped with the loud clang of metal on metal. The sword rebounded off Mercury's prosthetic legs. Mercury's counter-kick connected, and Shaoran was flung back ten feet.
It didn't feel awesome, to say the least, but nothing was broken. "Crap!" Metal legs was something he wasn't expecting. But it gave him an idea for one tactic. As Mercury was closing in for the knockout, Shaoran pulled a paper jufu out and called, "Raitei shourai!"
A thunderbolt pierced the sky and struck Mercury midair, causing his prosthetic legs to lock in place. His body was shielded by his aura, but left unable to deliver the intended strike. Thrown off balance, he curled up and rolled with his momentum. It only took a couple seconds more to regain servomotor control, but it was long enough to lose his advantage over the kid.
Across the street, Emerald was getting so tired of this girl. There was never really a good time for Emerald to use her semblance to develop a convincing illusion, because Sakura kept leaping off trees and mailboxes, slashing with her sword, and dodging blows. The magically sharp sword she wielded had cut clean through the chain of one of her weapons, detaching a sickle where it still lay on the ground.
Emerald just wanted a second to regroup, to get some distance. She switched Thief's Respite into its handgun mode, and fired off six shots directly into Sakura's chest.
Sakura fell back almost immediately.
Shaoran screamed, "SAKURAAA!" He threw a feint at Mercury to escape his reach, then leapt over to Sakura's side as fast as he possibly could.
Emerald's eyes went wide. "Oh shit." She hadn't even thought about it, but in this world, most people's aura was so weak that they could die on the first gunshot. She was so immersed in the flow of battle that she used her normal combat forms without thinking. The guilt barely had a chance to hit her before something remarkable happened.
Sakura started getting herself off the ground. "I'm okay!" And it was true; she was winded and bruised, but not a single shot had pierced her flesh. At her feet lay scattered bullets, none of which could penetrate her handmade battle costume.
It was not Tomoyo's skill alone which protected Sakura, but the white spidersilk fabric from which she created the dress. Woven by Spider Grandmother herself, it was stronger than kevlar, whiter than snow, and a natural bulletproof material.
In his anger at what had nearly happened to Sakura, Shaoran threw himself at Emerald in a series of frantic slashes with his sword. He was well-trained at his martial art, but he did not learn how to channel his rage, and his form suffered as a result. Though he had more harmful intent, she had no trouble stepping out of the way.
Left without an opponent, Mercury decided to take a run at knocking out Sakura, the girl Cinder obviously had the most interest in. He leapt over the burning picket fence and launched himself towards her, but as he leapt through the air, the man with the wings swooped down and raised his sword right in Mercury's flight path. Mercury was able to complete his mid-air turn early, and push his prosthetic feet against the flat of Yue's blade. Somehow, this was enough to reverse Mercury's momentum, and allowed him to backflip back to a standing position.
The pair of silver-haired men eyed each other with mutual distrust. Yue broke the silence, "I will be your opponent." Seconds later, as if by some unspoken signal, the two men charged each other.
Without the swordsman to distract Cinder, Kerberos didn't pose much of a challenge to her. Kerberos completed an aerial strafing run against her, to little effect. While he turned around, she took the time to concentrate on her spell. The magic deposited a block of solid ice, growing from Kero's paws all the way up his belly, encasing his legs in ice in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't hold the fire-breather forever — probably two minutes at best — but it was long enough to shift her focus to her real target, the girl in the white dress.
Neither side had shared any names, so Cinder Fall didn't know who Sakura Kinomoto was, but she knew what she was: a magical girl. And even though things had gotten violent, it didn't mean that hope was lost in bringing her over to the other side. The magical girls of other worlds had a word for overwhelming use of battle magic to get someone to trust you. What was it again? Oh, yes, she remembered, they call it "befriending".
Sakura took a breather to consider her situation. She wasn't used to fighting so many foes, so this was her first chance to think. Ultimately, her course seemed simple: destroy the evil creature, and the older folks would leave, having nothing left to fight for. And then, she could extinguish the fires that the magician onee-san was causing. That left the problem of how exactly to destroy the beast.
Sakura had never tried to kill anything with her magic before; she had never wanted to kill anything. She considered just erasing the beast, but she wasn't quite sure that would actually kill it — the time Tomoyo and her classmates had been erased, they were able to come back after she sealed the card. She could crush the cage with Earthy, but that seemed kind of gross, and what if those cage bars were super-strong? Sticking a sword between the bars seemed risky for lots of reasons. She briefly considered sealing the grimm into a card, but rejected that idea out of hand.
She decided to go with Erase. And if she couldn't erase the grimm's nothingness, she would try the Hope card next. She pulled her deck out of her pocket — even Tomoyo's highest fashion had pockets for Sakura Cards — as she ran towards the caged beowolf. But her moment's hesitation cost her chance. A burst of fire traveled across her path to the grimm. She looked over to the source.
"Now, now. We can't have you getting hurt by the creature we all worked so hard to capture." Cinder tried to convey concern with her voice, but came out mostly patronizing, probably from habit.
"You can't... You can't have anything to do with that evil thing! That arm!" Sakura argued. To be honest, it was mostly instinctual revulsion and not a real argument, but she just knew it would be just awful for that other girl to live with that terrible black claw for an arm.
"You think because you have some power, that you can stay pure forever? That you can judge me for my life?"
"No, I—"
"You need to be strong to survive. I can teach you to be strong."
"But not at that cost. Not like you are."
"If you can't accept me for who I am, I'm just going to have to make you understand!" Fireballs flared at Cinder's palms, and about ten more orbs formed in front of her. She released the balls of flame, firing them directly at Sakura.
"Watery!" she cried, and the maiden-like form of Watery emerged from a card. The fireballs were snuffed out in a curtain of water.
Cinder, flames at her hands and feet, flew around the water, and looked to be sending another spell. Sakura tried a magically-assisted jump out of the way, only to find her feet were locked in ice — her own water frozen by Cinder's magic.
Swords of magma formed around Cinder, then sliced through the air towards Sakura. Unable to move, Sakura frantically called out, "Shield!" A magical card activated, and golden-hued spherical shell surrounded Sakura. The lava blades struck the shield, shattering into shards of obsidian on impact.
She took a moment to let Watery thaw the ice at her feet. It was too dangerous to stay on the ground, she decided. She withdrew Fly from her deck of cards, and touched it to her wand. Fluffy white wings appeared at the back of her pink wellies, then she launched into the air.
Cinder summoned a hail of volcanic rock, about ten potato-shaped stones, and launched them at Sakura. Sakura flew out of the way, but Cinder moved through the air to follow her. Cinder chased her down past a tall palm tree, covered in bushy ivy nearly to the top, which is where Sakura chose to strike. Activating another card by name, "Wood!", she sent its magic to grow tendrils of vines out from the tree.
One by one, Cinder's limbs were entangled in rapid succession, wrapped in coils of deep green ivy. Immobile and suspended thirty feet off the ground, she summoned a single glowing sword in front of her. Cinder still had the upper hand, and she wasn't afraid to use it. Her grimm arm stretched impossibly long, and in its claw it grasped the lava sword. Three strokes later, and vines sloughed off all her limbs. Cinder was free.
Flare arrows erupted from Cinder's hands, then bore down on Sakura. She dodged to the left; one fireball singed the outside of her shield, leaving the other flame projectile to embed itself into a previously undamaged residence.
Sakura let The Fight return to its card form; she was in a magic duel now. With her opponent using elemental power instead of martial arts, it was better to redirect more power to The Shield.
"You shouldn't hate me just because I'm different," Cinder chided Sakura. She evoked a huge wave of fire towards the girl, just to drive in the point. The befriending ritual seemed to require large amounts of magical beams, after all.
As the inferno licked the edge of Sakura's shield, she started to think about Cinder's words. Had she been too hard on her? The monstrous arm seemed evil, but knew she shouldn't judge people like that. Maybe something bad happened had happened to the woman?
While pondering this, she ran smack into a barrage of lava knives, which sounded like a cloud of breaking glass against her force field around her. Shield was strong, she knew, but it couldn't hold out forever. She had to get it together.
Her chest was really starting to hurt in the places where she had been shot, too. It felt pretty bad at first, when the bullets were caught by her undine dress, and now it was starting to feel nearly that bad again. She really didn't want to fight this woman, after all. She winced from the pain, and wondered if she could get away with apologizing to the woman.
Just Shoot Her!
With so much going on, it was quite difficult for Tomoyo to capture the action. She was used to filming Sakura fight one opponent or spell at a time, and here she was trying to get cinematography of three separate fights at the same time.
All of them could be interesting, of course, but her instincts were to focus on Sakura. As usual. This worked for a while, but the fight against Emerald was highly mobile, and very frustrating to capture on video. Sakura was using Dash and Jump just to stay ahead of the tan-skinned girl, who was pretty quick on her feet. As a result, it was a struggle to keep either of them in-frame.
Tomoyo managed to capture Sakura heroically severing the chain of the other girl's weapon with her sword. But the next moment, they jumped out of the shot once again, this time around a dark corner. Mere seconds later they ran back into view, but with all the dashing between the bushes and burning buildings, the digital videocamera didn't seem to keep up with sudden changes in lighting. Tomoyo, unaware that she could fix it in post, decided to change focus to another, more stationary fight.
Most of the motion of Kerberos' and Yue's battle against the leader of the "cryptozoologist" group involved dodging each other's magical attacks. Because Kerberos and Cinder both favored fire attacks, at least there was plenty of lighting for Tomoyo to record what was happening. As for what was happening, that was kind of hard for her to understand. Sometimes two fireballs would collide in mid-air, but sometimes rays of flame would shoot past each other and both combatants would have to dodge.
Yue fired a volley of ice arrows from his bow, but they were summarily melted in another gout of flame erupting from Cinder's palm. Cinder then retaliated by conjuring dimly glowing blades in mid-air; with a wave of her hand, they flew like missiles to Yue. Kerberos pushed Yue out of the way of a blade at the last minute, but managed to take a glancing blow from one of her daggers. He yelped in pain, but the tough hide of his true form took most of the blow.
Tomoyo had the impression that Clow's two guardian spirits weren't doing too well in their battle against Cinder, so she turned her attention to Shaoran. She wanted her film to focus on heroism, she told herself. But ultimately she was just an eleven year old girl who didn't like seeing her friends get hurt.
Even from halfway down the block, she could tell that she was getting a real martial arts exhibition from Shaoran and his opponent, Mercury. It reminded her of a samurai drama, how they'd stare each other down, then simultaneously spring into action to attack each other. Then it reminded her of Hong Kong cinema, with Shaoran's kung-fu facing against his opponent's capoeira, in a flurry of punches and kicks. If it were a movie, she'd say the two were near evenly matched, which made for a very exciting fight.
Shaoran, in the middle of that fight, did not share Tomoyo's rosy assessment of his combat performance, which he rated as "narrowly avoiding being creamed." Twice already, he had barely managed to raise his arm to avoid taking kicks to the face. The blocks held, but hurt anyway; he was against an adult opponent who obviously was not trying to fight fair.
In that case, Shaoran didn't have to fight fair, either. He retreated, luring Mercury into the vicinity of a burning house, black smoke billowing out the top. When Mercury looked ready to strike, Shaoran pressed a paper card against his sword, calling, "Fukka Shourai!" At his call, a magical gust sent a rush of dark, acrid smoke across Mercury's path.
Between coughs, Mercury cursed through the cloud, "Where the hell are you, brat?"
The answer was, surprisingly enough: directly behind him. Shaoran siezed the opening, and swung his sword at Mercury's legs, only to have the thrust stopped with the loud clang of metal on metal. The sword rebounded off Mercury's prosthetic legs. Mercury's counter-kick connected, and Shaoran was flung back ten feet.
It didn't feel awesome, to say the least, but nothing was broken. "Crap!" Metal legs was something he wasn't expecting. But it gave him an idea for one tactic. As Mercury was closing in for the knockout, Shaoran pulled a paper jufu out and called, "Raitei shourai!"
A thunderbolt pierced the sky and struck Mercury midair, causing his prosthetic legs to lock in place. His body was shielded by his aura, but left unable to deliver the intended strike. Thrown off balance, he curled up and rolled with his momentum. It only took a couple seconds more to regain servomotor control, but it was long enough to lose his advantage over the kid.
Across the street, Emerald was getting so tired of this girl. There was never really a good time for Emerald to use her semblance to develop a convincing illusion, because Sakura kept leaping off trees and mailboxes, slashing with her sword, and dodging blows. The magically sharp sword she wielded had cut clean through the chain of one of her weapons, detaching a sickle where it still lay on the ground.
Emerald just wanted a second to regroup, to get some distance. She switched Thief's Respite into its handgun mode, and fired off six shots directly into Sakura's chest.
Sakura fell back almost immediately.
Shaoran screamed, "SAKURAAA!" He threw a feint at Mercury to escape his reach, then leapt over to Sakura's side as fast as he possibly could.
Emerald's eyes went wide. "Oh shit." She hadn't even thought about it, but in this world, most people's aura was so weak that they could die on the first gunshot. She was so immersed in the flow of battle that she used her normal combat forms without thinking. The guilt barely had a chance to hit her before something remarkable happened.
Sakura started getting herself off the ground. "I'm okay!" And it was true; she was winded and bruised, but not a single shot had pierced her flesh. At her feet lay scattered bullets, none of which could penetrate her handmade battle costume.
It was not Tomoyo's skill alone which protected Sakura, but the white spidersilk fabric from which she created the dress. Woven by Spider Grandmother herself, it was stronger than kevlar, whiter than snow, and a natural bulletproof material.
In his anger at what had nearly happened to Sakura, Shaoran threw himself at Emerald in a series of frantic slashes with his sword. He was well-trained at his martial art, but he did not learn how to channel his rage, and his form suffered as a result. Though he had more harmful intent, she had no trouble stepping out of the way.
Left without an opponent, Mercury decided to take a run at knocking out Sakura, the girl Cinder obviously had the most interest in. He leapt over the burning picket fence and launched himself towards her, but as he leapt through the air, the man with the wings swooped down and raised his sword right in Mercury's flight path. Mercury was able to complete his mid-air turn early, and push his prosthetic feet against the flat of Yue's blade. Somehow, this was enough to reverse Mercury's momentum, and allowed him to backflip back to a standing position.
The pair of silver-haired men eyed each other with mutual distrust. Yue broke the silence, "I will be your opponent." Seconds later, as if by some unspoken signal, the two men charged each other.
Without the swordsman to distract Cinder, Kerberos didn't pose much of a challenge to her. Kerberos completed an aerial strafing run against her, to little effect. While he turned around, she took the time to concentrate on her spell. The magic deposited a block of solid ice, growing from Kero's paws all the way up his belly, encasing his legs in ice in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't hold the fire-breather forever — probably two minutes at best — but it was long enough to shift her focus to her real target, the girl in the white dress.
Neither side had shared any names, so Cinder Fall didn't know who Sakura Kinomoto was, but she knew what she was: a magical girl. And even though things had gotten violent, it didn't mean that hope was lost in bringing her over to the other side. The magical girls of other worlds had a word for overwhelming use of battle magic to get someone to trust you. What was it again? Oh, yes, she remembered, they call it "befriending".
Sakura took a breather to consider her situation. She wasn't used to fighting so many foes, so this was her first chance to think. Ultimately, her course seemed simple: destroy the evil creature, and the older folks would leave, having nothing left to fight for. And then, she could extinguish the fires that the magician onee-san was causing. That left the problem of how exactly to destroy the beast.
Sakura had never tried to kill anything with her magic before; she had never wanted to kill anything. She considered just erasing the beast, but she wasn't quite sure that would actually kill it — the time Tomoyo and her classmates had been erased, they were able to come back after she sealed the card. She could crush the cage with Earthy, but that seemed kind of gross, and what if those cage bars were super-strong? Sticking a sword between the bars seemed risky for lots of reasons. She briefly considered sealing the grimm into a card, but rejected that idea out of hand.
She decided to go with Erase. And if she couldn't erase the grimm's nothingness, she would try the Hope card next. She pulled her deck out of her pocket — even Tomoyo's highest fashion had pockets for Sakura Cards — as she ran towards the caged beowolf. But her moment's hesitation cost her chance. A burst of fire traveled across her path to the grimm. She looked over to the source.
"Now, now. We can't have you getting hurt by the creature we all worked so hard to capture." Cinder tried to convey concern with her voice, but came out mostly patronizing, probably from habit.
"You can't... You can't have anything to do with that evil thing! That arm!" Sakura argued. To be honest, it was mostly instinctual revulsion and not a real argument, but she just knew it would be just awful for that other girl to live with that terrible black claw for an arm.
"You think because you have some power, that you can stay pure forever? That you can judge me for my life?"
"No, I—"
"You need to be strong to survive. I can teach you to be strong."
"But not at that cost. Not like you are."
"If you can't accept me for who I am, I'm just going to have to make you understand!" Fireballs flared at Cinder's palms, and about ten more orbs formed in front of her. She released the balls of flame, firing them directly at Sakura.
"Watery!" she cried, and the maiden-like form of Watery emerged from a card. The fireballs were snuffed out in a curtain of water.
Cinder, flames at her hands and feet, flew around the water, and looked to be sending another spell. Sakura tried a magically-assisted jump out of the way, only to find her feet were locked in ice — her own water frozen by Cinder's magic.
Swords of magma formed around Cinder, then sliced through the air towards Sakura. Unable to move, Sakura frantically called out, "Shield!" A magical card activated, and golden-hued spherical shell surrounded Sakura. The lava blades struck the shield, shattering into shards of obsidian on impact.
She took a moment to let Watery thaw the ice at her feet. It was too dangerous to stay on the ground, she decided. She withdrew Fly from her deck of cards, and touched it to her wand. Fluffy white wings appeared at the back of her pink wellies, then she launched into the air.
Cinder summoned a hail of volcanic rock, about ten potato-shaped stones, and launched them at Sakura. Sakura flew out of the way, but Cinder moved through the air to follow her. Cinder chased her down past a tall palm tree, covered in bushy ivy nearly to the top, which is where Sakura chose to strike. Activating another card by name, "Wood!", she sent its magic to grow tendrils of vines out from the tree.
One by one, Cinder's limbs were entangled in rapid succession, wrapped in coils of deep green ivy. Immobile and suspended thirty feet off the ground, she summoned a single glowing sword in front of her. Cinder still had the upper hand, and she wasn't afraid to use it. Her grimm arm stretched impossibly long, and in its claw it grasped the lava sword. Three strokes later, and vines sloughed off all her limbs. Cinder was free.
Flare arrows erupted from Cinder's hands, then bore down on Sakura. She dodged to the left; one fireball singed the outside of her shield, leaving the other flame projectile to embed itself into a previously undamaged residence.
Sakura let The Fight return to its card form; she was in a magic duel now. With her opponent using elemental power instead of martial arts, it was better to redirect more power to The Shield.
"You shouldn't hate me just because I'm different," Cinder chided Sakura. She evoked a huge wave of fire towards the girl, just to drive in the point. The befriending ritual seemed to require large amounts of magical beams, after all.
As the inferno licked the edge of Sakura's shield, she started to think about Cinder's words. Had she been too hard on her? The monstrous arm seemed evil, but knew she shouldn't judge people like that. Maybe something bad happened had happened to the woman?
While pondering this, she ran smack into a barrage of lava knives, which sounded like a cloud of breaking glass against her force field around her. Shield was strong, she knew, but it couldn't hold out forever. She had to get it together.
Her chest was really starting to hurt in the places where she had been shot, too. It felt pretty bad at first, when the bullets were caught by her undine dress, and now it was starting to feel nearly that bad again. She really didn't want to fight this woman, after all. She winced from the pain, and wondered if she could get away with apologizing to the woman.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto