>>5942938The masked man answers with silence for a long moment, considering you. A bead of sweat traces its way down the side of your face as he gives her a firm nod.
The girl comes for you, sword glinting in the light as she raises it up and down in a fast, powerful arc aimed at your face. You forget all this bullshit about not making sudden moves even faster, whipping out a kunai and narrowly deflecting it. Unfortunately the only reason you managed to block it in time was because the distance between your speed was balanced out by the distance she had to cross to get within range.
On the second swipe of her glinting blade the calculus of speed is no longer in your favor. Your reaction time is just too slow, your mind too hyper focused on her first swing to anticipate the second.
Your kunai deflected her blade to the right, so she flows with that energy in a bizarrely familiar spinning flourish that has her twirl in a tight circle, her blade flashing out to lash you across the outside of your thigh, right into your pocket.
Several things happen in quick succession.
First, a noiseless thud in the side of your upper left thigh. For an instant it felt disturbingly similar to a punch, a bruising impact, but that’s before the blade extricates itself from your flesh with the searing agony of a jagged saw, dulled only by the numb warmth of flowing blood and severed nerve.
Your leg goes lame and fails you, causing you to lurch to the side clutching your torn wound with your free hand.
You feel a sensation of heat build up, and then pressure.
Mist starts spewing forth from the bloody slit cut into your leg, the pressure of it ripping your pocket open and aggravating the severed flap in your flesh immensely as you careen into the dirt in agony.
‘My blood is mist.’ flashes the insane thought through your brain in a panicked internal screech, almost drowning out the kernel of wisdom in your core informing you that it was most likely the paper tag Hotaru gave you.
Your ability to see dims, sending another course of panic through your system as you pray that the darkening of your sight was merely the mist filling the air around you in bilious clouds that seemed flecked pink with static particles of human blood.
Your vision is then substantially improved as a great burst of concussive force and flame bursts into angered fury in the masked man’s face, ripping him from his branch like a savage blow from a wrathful god.
Detonated wreckage of splintered wood and burning leaves rain down in the mist around you. The girl who cut you leaps away from you as the mist between you forms into pointed spikes of water, stopping only narrowly short of piercing her heart due to her abundance of caution and swift reflexes.
A soft wind brushes the side of your face as you lie in the dirt.
>What do? 