VILLE DE L'éPINE - THORN CITY

  FRANCE

  Butter woke with a gasp.

  Wind tore at her hair, cold and thin. The sky stretched out endlessly above her, pale violet deepening into night, and below her, dizzying miles of ocean churned like waiting teeth.

  She was falling.

  The world was a distant, blurry map thousands of feet below, the air so thin and cold it burned her lungs, they were still climbing, having fallen from a height where passenger jets flew like specks in the vast, indifferent blue.

  Her limbs flailed for a split second before she righted herself in the air, eyes wild. “Christ!”

  Then she heard laughter.

  A few feet away, Mango was plummeting too, casual, upside down, waving at her with a bright, psychotic grin. “Hiiiiii~!”

  Suddenly, a feeling.

  It started as a sudden, violent revulsion, a primal scream from her very magic, recoiling in horror at the violation it sensed being prepared. It was a warning, a shield slamming down over her soul, but Mango’s command was already in motion, a casual, almost playful whisper that became a surgical, psychic command. Butter had immediately used her magic to shield everything inside her as Mango tried to petal-step her entire organs out of her body.

  But not fast enough.

  The magic was a fraction of a second too late. A sickening, hollow lurch echoed from deep within her, a sensation of something vital being neatly excised and folded out of reality. A quarter of her liver was just... gone. Vanished from her body into god-knows-where. Hot, coppery blood instantly pooled in the vacant space, flooding her insides. She choked, a wet, gurgling sound, and coughed a spray of crimson into the rushing air. Her magic, now fully engaged, flared like a star going nova within her, a desperate, automatic response, knitting and sealing, rebuilding the ravaged tissue. The pain was a living thing, gnawing at the edges of her consciousness.

  Mango frowned, her head tilting like a confused puppy. "Uh? Why didn't it work?"

  The question, so innocently delivered after such a visceral violation, shattered any last semblance of restraint in Butter. The protective revulsion she’d felt was instantly incinerated by a rage so pure and hot it felt like a new kind of magic. A raw, wounded cry was torn from her throat, cutting through the howling wind. She didn't think. She moved.

  Blasting herself forward on a torrent of raw essence, she closed the distance in a blink. Harmony was in her hands, not as a tool of defense, but as an instrument of absolute vengeance. She swung, putting the entire force of her body, her pain, and her fury into the arc. The air screamed around the shaft, and for a glorious moment, it was aimed to blast Mango’s head clean off her shoulders.

  Fwip.

  Mango petal-stepped away, the air where her neck had been rippling. She reappeared a hundred feet away, falling upside down behind Butter, completely unbothered.

  "La La La La la," Mango sang, her slingshot already whipping through the air.

  Blue pellets, condensed spheres of concussive force, shot towards Butter. There was no time for thought, only reaction. Harmony became an extension of her senses. She didn't just block; she deflected, her body a whirlwind of precise, powerful motions. A pellet came from above—POW!—she batted it straight back the way it came. One zipped from the side—WHACK!—Harmony met it with a resonant chime, sending it careening away. Another shot up from underneath, aiming for her spine... she twisted in mid-air, a dancer in the void, and smashed it downwards with a grunt.

  Mango was an unorthodox, maddening fighter. She didn't stay in one place, petal-stepping in a dizzying, unpredictable staccato. Butter’s eyes were useless; Mango was a flicker at the edge of her vision, a ghost. She had to stop seeing and start feeling. She let her essence bleed out, creating a psychic sonar net around her. She felt the displacement of air to her left: POW! A shift in pressure from behind and above, she spun, Harmony a dark blur, CRACK! She sensed the coalescence of energy directly below her feet and kicked off empty air, a blue pellet shooting through the space her heart had occupied a millisecond before.

  It was a brutal, cinematic ballet of deflection and evasion. Left. POW! Right. WHAM! Over the shoulder. CLANG! A desperate, spinning backhand. SHING! She was a fortress, a maelstrom, meeting every impossible angle of attack with flawless, furious precision.

  Butter’s eyes narrowed. Mango’s eyes were locked on her, that grin unnaturally wide as they fell together through the open sky.

  Without warning, Mango snapped her slingshot forward, a blur of motion, and fired a black pellet no larger than a marble.

  Butter’s instincts kicked in. She raised up Harmony, attempting to block the projectile.

  The pellet slammed into it.

  KRA-KOOM!

  The air ruptured with a sharp, concussive shockwave. Butter was flung backward like a comet, Harmony almost vibrating out of her palms. Mango spiraled too, flipping elegantly before steadying her descent like it was all part of a game.

  Butter gritted her teeth, her arm trembling. "What the fuzz was that pellet made of?"

  It wasn't the raw kinetic force, she'd trained against tank shells, stood her ground against impacts that would vaporize a city block. Harmony was designed to disperse that.

  No, this was different. It was the density. The pellet hit with the total force of fifty tank shells, but compressed into a point no larger than a marble. The pressure was astronomical. Harmony shuddered, dispersing the blast wave, but it was like trying to stop a tsunami with a screen door... it took the brunt, but the violent, localized shock still slammed through the weapon and into her bones. It wasn't a push; it was a fundamental vibration that threatened to shatter the molecular bonds in her grip.

  There was no time to think. No tell-tale fwip of petals from a distance. Mango simply was present, petal-stepping directly into Butter's guard mid-fall. She arrived already in motion, a vortex of lethal intent materializing at point-blank range.

  Her body became a whirling dervish of limbs, but there was no master's grace in it. It was the frantic, over-committed spin of a child mimicking a cartoon ninja: all wild, centrifugal force with no core stability. One leg hooked clumsily over the other, not for balance, but to violently crank her torso into a spin that physics should have punished.

  Yet, from that chaotic momentum, a single, terrifyingly precise movement emerged. Her hand, held in a loose, almost sloppy fist, snapped forward in a perfect, straight-line karate punch. It was a single frame of lethal clarity ripped from a reel of animated chaos, and it was aimed with unerring, brutal accuracy at the delicate hollow of Butter's throat.

  Butter flowed with the motion.

  She twisted at the last second, redirecting Mango’s force using a Tai Chi roll, her free hand sweeping the punch aside like water around a stone. Her feet found momentary tension in the air, years of training instinctively giving her "balance" in the void.

  Then came the exchange.

  Falling at terminal speed, two silhouettes clashed against a backdrop of the evening sky. In a deliberate, almost dismissive motion, Butter let Harmony go. The nunchaku, tethered to her by an unseen bond, spun away into the void behind her. She didn't need it for this. Her hands were her first weapons, her truest instruments. Mango was a prodigy, a natural born killer, but Butter was a master. She would outskill her. She would prove that honed discipline could shatter psychotic instinct.

  Mango’s attack was a language of violence Butter didn't speak. It wasn't the refined grammar of Wing Chun or the brutal poetry of Krav Maga. It was a screaming, full-color cartoon.

  There was no discipline, no economy of motion, only a child’s ecstatic, literal interpretation of her favorite show. She wasn't trying to win a fight; she was reenacting an episode. A wild, telegraphed wind-up became the "Galaxy Tornado," her small body spinning like a top with reckless, centrifugal force. It was followed by a hopping, erratic "Comet Kick," her leg flailing out in an arc that made no tactical sense but was a perfect replica of Sparky's signature move.

  It was the ultimate feint: there was no feint. It was pure, unadulterated chaos, unpredictable because its creator had never learned the rules she was breaking.

  Butter absorbed the rhythm. She bent, circled, redirected, the softness of Tai Chi blending into tight counters. Then, a twist, Butter ducked a roundhouse and flipped forward in midair, using the inertia to bring her elbow down hard toward Mango’s collarbone.

  Mango blocked, retaliating with a piston-like punch directly to Butter’s ribs.

  It hit. THUD.

  The amulet around Butter’s neck shimmered, absorbing the blow with a flare of light, the strike’s power dispersed harmlessly through a pulse of magic.

  Mango’s eyes widened. Butter didn’t hesitate. Her stance tightened, Wing Chun now. Direct. Explosive.

  She unleashed a blitz, five perfectly aligned chain punches in less than a millisecond. Each hit stacked, the power doubling automatically with every blow.

  POP-POP-POP-POP-BOOM-!

  The final blow connected with Mango’s solar plexus.

  The air around them rippled.

  Mango’s body whipped backward, spinning uncontrollably through the sky, vanishing into the clouds with a distorted scream.

  Butter’s chest heaved. The wind howled around her. The clouds parted, and the ocean rushed up to meet her.

  She hit the water like a falling star.

  SPLAAAAASH!

  Waves swallowed her whole, glowing faintly as Harmony's glow flickered around her sinking form.

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  ///

  The Pont de l'épine—the Thorn Bridge—stretched across the strait like a steel artery, its six lanes of constant traffic roaring beneath arc-lamps and dusk-drenched banners. Cars and freight trucks rolled past in both directions, oblivious to the supernatural clash unfolding miles offshore.

  Mango stood alone on the bridge’s railing, her bare feet bleeding lightly against rusted steel, a sundress fluttering in the wind. Her curly locs danced behind her, and her strawberry-shaped earrings glinted faintly under passing headlights. Her combat boots were slung casually over one shoulder, dangling.

  She stared out at the ocean where Butter had vanished.

  Her hand clenched over her chest, a faint scorch mark on her dress where the last punch had landed. She winced, grinning through the pain.

  “That hurt really really bad,” she muttered, eyes watering.

  ///

  Suddenly, the waves shuddered.

  SLAP!

  Butter’s hand smacked the surface of the ocean with inhuman precision, so fast, so sharp, that surface tension hardened like glass beneath her palm. In one impossibly fluid motion, she lifted herself out as if the sea were solid ground, twisting upright in mid-air.

  Then with a thunderous BOOM she kicked off.

  A sonic crack echoed across the water as Butter launched forward, tearing across the surface at high speed. Mist trailed behind her like twin wings. Every footstep hit the ocean like thunderclaps, her balance perfect, her focus razor-sharp.

  She was a bullet of white light and momentum, Harmony spinning behind her, glowing like a comet.

  Up ahead, Thorn Bridge loomed, and on it, Mango stood waiting.

  Mango exhaled slowly and pressed her palm to her chest. A warm green light bloomed beneath her fingers, soft at first, then pulsing. It spread like moss across her skin, closing bruises, mending fractures. Vines coiled in and out of her pores like living stitches, wrapping her ribs, glowing faintly under the fabric of her sundress. Her expression slackened, relieved.

  “Much better,” she whispered, flexing her fingers.

  FWOOOSH!

  A geyser of water exploded into the air, Butter launched out of the ocean like a missile, pirouetting once as she twisted Harmony in a glowing arc. The nunchaku split as she swung one half toward Mango’s skull, the chain singing as it cracked through the sunset.

  Mango shrieked - not out of fear, but sheer surprise - and flipped backward, her feet slicing the air above her head. While mid-flip, she slammed her left palm against the concrete.

  BOOM.

  The ground bucked.

  Vines burst from the road: thick, whip-fast, angry. They snaked around Butter mid-air like striking cobras and yanked her down hard.

  CRASH!

  Butter slammed into the side of a parked car, the metal caving in like paper under her weight. Glass shattered, the alarm going off with a panicked wail. Smoke curled from the engine.

  Mango blinked. “Oh no, sorry! I panicked! Hope nobody got hurt,” she blurted, waving at the ruined vehicle like a confused tourist.

  Butter groaned, peeling herself out of the wreckage, Harmony still glowing in her grip. She rubbed her shoulder and gave Mango a flat look.

  “I’m assuming you’re from the Syndicate,” Butter muttered, brushing off bits of fender. “Are assassins supposed to be this... uh... nice?”

  Mango tilted her head, almost bashfully. “I mean, we don’t have to be jerks about it.”

  To their sonic-speed perceptions, the world had become a viscous, slow-motion painting. Cars were floating sculptures, their headlights stretching into long, luminous trails. Horn blares were deep, drawn-out groans.

  Butter’s prosthetic leg whirred, a deliberate, aggressive pitch shift. Mango’s eyes flicked toward the sound for a microsecond.

  Butter seized it. She knew a direct assault was useless. Mango’s spatial awareness was absolute; she could petal-step out of any linear charge before it even began. So Butter didn't try one approach. She tried five.

  She blitzed forward, a phantom in the slow-motion world of her own heightened focus. Her first movement was a feint low, a lunge aimed at the knees that she abandoned halfway. As expected, Mango’s form shimmered, beginning to petal-step to the left. But Butter was already canceling her own momentum, essence flaring as she reversed direction, appearing to commit to a high, sweeping strike with Harmony aimed at the right shoulder. Mango’s grin widened, her body flickering again, anticipating the hit.

  It was another feint.

  Butter let the swing pull her body around in a full, dizzying spin, using the centrifugal force to launch herself not at Mango, but at the empty air a few feet to her side. It was a nonsensical move, a whiff that left her back exposed for a critical microsecond. Mango’s head tilted, the psychotic glee momentarily replaced by a flicker of genuine confusion at the tactical blunder. It was the opening Butter needed.

  Planting her foot on nothing but solidified air, she became a ricochet. The final, true blitz was a burst of pure, undiluted speed that wasn't an angle Mango had calculated for. Her right hand formed a perfect Shaolin knuckle fist, her own soft, gold-tinged magic coalescing around her knuckles into a brilliant, sun-point intensity. She didn't aim to bruise; she aimed to resonate, to send a shockwave through the very fiber of Mango's being.

  The strike connected with Mango's sternum not with a crack of bone, but with a deep, internal THUMM, like the toll of a massive bell heard from within a sealed tomb.

  It was a tuning fork struck against a mountain. The force didn't stop at the point of impact; it reverberated through Mango, a shockwave of harmonic energy that traveled through her bones, her organs, her very magic. It blasted her backward, skidding across the asphalt of the slow-moving bridge.

  "Heyyy! What did you do?!" Mango whined, clutching her chest where the strange vibration still hummed.

  Butter fell into a low stance, Harmony held ready. "I, uh... harmonized your frequency."

  Mango tried to petal-step. A few confused petals sputtered from her feet, but she remained firmly on the ground. "No poof?" she muttered, looking down at her own feet in betrayal.

  Butter nodded, her breathing controlled. "No poof for the next five seconds. If my suspicions are correct based on how fast you regenerate... I just disrupted your internal energy flow." Her eyes hardened. "Now. Why did you kidnap me?"

  Mango shrugged, pouting as she rubbed her sternum. "Dunno. Dad said I could play with you." A beat, then she remembered, her face lighting up with manic glee. "Oh! And I get to send you to the happy place!"

  The term landed like a drop of poison in Butter's mind. "Mango," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "What is the happy place?"

  Mango's shoulders lifted in an exaggerated, childlike shrug. "Dunno. Dad says it's where we send bad people so they can change. They get punished, then they get better." The words were a hollow recitation, devoid of any true understanding.

  A cold dread began to crystallize in Butter's gut. "And where is it? This happy place?"

  Mango scrunched her face, tapping a finger to her lips in mock concentration. "Dunno. But they're usually very, very still when they leave. And super bloody." Her expression then brightened into that terrifying, vacant smile. "Maybe their... sparkle goes there? And they get to eat candy and snacks all day!"

  The pieces didn't just click; they slammed together, forming a picture of such profound horror that Butter's breath hitched. The "Happy Place" wasn't a destination. It was a euphemism. A final, bloody stillness. Mango hadn't been sent to retrieve her. She had been sent to discard her.

  And the most soul-chilling part was that the weapon in front of her had no idea. She saw this as a game, a playdate with a fun new friend who had cool plushies. Even now, after a strike that should have been a fight-ender, Mango was merely annoyed, not enraged. She was playing on easy mode, her twisted fondness the only reason Butter was still breathing.

  That fragile, psychotic affection was a fraying thread. And Butter had to sever it before Mango got bored, or worse, before her "Dad" decided the game had gone on long enough.

  There was no more time. Butter became a blur of golden light and desperate motion, lunging forward.

  It was useless.

  Even without her teleportation, Mango was a prodigy, her cartoonish style suddenly revealing its lethal foundation.

  "Leapfrog!!!" Mango yelled, vaulting over Butter's head in a fluid overhand arm-spring, landing in a crouch. She did another twirl, a disorienting, almost drunken motion that threw Butter's timing off completely.

  Only the sharp THWAK of the slingshot warned her.

  Another black pellet, a miniature death star, was rushing towards her face.

  Butter dropped Harmony. It clattered to the ground. She couldn't dodge, the pellet would tear through the slow-moving cars and families trapped in this metallic river. She couldn't whack it away with Harmony, the last impact had nearly shattered her arms.

  Her next move was suicidal.

  You've trained for this... a calm part of her mind whispered.

  I'VE NEVER DONE IT WITH A DEATH BALL FLYING AT MY FACE!!! the rest of her screamed.

  There was no more time.

  She stretched out her palm, flat and open, directly in the path of the pellet. Instead of resisting, she yielded. As the marble of condensed force touched her skin, her entire body became a single, flowing wheel. She rolled her wrist, her arm, her shoulder, her torso, a perfect, circular Taichi motion that embraced the projectile, accepting its energy and adding it to her own momentum. For a breathtaking moment, the black pellet orbited her palm, trapped in a field of redirected kinetic force, before she completed the circle and hurled it, not back at Mango, but down, off the side of the bridge.

  It splashed into the ocean with a deep, muffled FOOM, sending up a geyser of water that seemed to hang in the air.

  Mango stared, her jaw unhinged. "Whoa," she breathed, genuine awe flattening her voice. "So awesome. Do it again!"

  As she spoke, a full corona of petals erupted from her shoulders, the harmonic handicap had worn off.

  Her grin returned, sharp and unhinged. The slingshot became a blur in her hands, loaded now with pellets that glowed a vicious, electric cyan. They hissed like angry serpents, their light bleeding trails into the slow-motion air.

  “Let’s try that again~”

  TWIP-TWIP-TWIP-!

  She fired in a flurry.

  Butter’s eyes narrowed. She leapt back, bouncing from the hoods of cars on the Thorn Bridge. In this syrupy reality, Butter moved with liquid grace, Harmony materializing and spinning in her hands like liquid wood. She deflected one pellet with a snap, sent another spinning into the highway divider with a shower of languid, sparkling fragments.

  Mango giggled, a sound like shattering glass in the slow-time, and hopped onto a passing truck, using its glacial ascent to launch herself high. Mid-flight, she twisted, body arching in a dancer’s spiral, and aimed down.

  Multiple pellets, blue as starlight, fired with pinpoint precision. Butter’s breath caught, they weren’t aimed at her directly.

  A blue pellet, deflected wildly from an impossible angle, sizzled past her head and struck a thick steel support beam of the bridge they were fighting under. Instead of vaporizing the beam in a shower of molten metal, it ricocheted with a sharp PING!, gouging a neat, shallow crater and zipping away.

  The sight was a cognitive splinter in Butter’s mind, even as she whirled to block the next attack. That shouldn't be possible. She had felt the force behind these pellets; a direct hit had the concussive power to tear through a main battle tank. They shouldn't ricochet off normal steel and concrete. They should punch through, obliterating everything in their path in a chain reaction of destruction.

  The answer, cold and simple, settled over her. Syndicate technology. The pellets weren't dumb munitions. They were smart. They were programmed to only interact with, and unleash their full destructive potential upon, a single designated target. To everything else in the universe, they were just inert, physical objects, capable of bouncing harmlessly away. It was the ultimate precision weapon, allowing Mango to fight in a crowded city without causing mass collateral damage. The realization was a chilling testament to the terrifying efficiency she was up against.

  CLANG! One bounced off a metal road sign.

  TING! Another ricocheted off the bridge's rails.

  WHACK! The third kissed a highway light pole.

  CRACK-CRACK-THUMP!

  All three smashed into Butter from behind, one nailing her in the back of the head, two slamming into her gut like hammers.

  She almost stumbled off the van but the purple gemstone at her neck pulsed violently.

  FOOM.

  A magic field flared to life, shimmering violet, absorbing the brunt of the impact before flickering dimly.

  Butter steadied herself, exhaling sharply.

  Mango pointed a finger, offended. “Hey! That’s not fair! You’re cheating!”

  Butter scratched the back of her neck, wincing. “I just... don’t like to get hit.”

  Mango’s eyes narrowed. She then vanished. A burst of flower petals exploded where she’d stood. Butter’s eyes widened, her heart skipped.

  POOF. Mango appeared behind her. Petals drifted. POOF. Above her. Left. Right. Again. Again.

  Fifty times in a heartbeat, petals swirling like a storm, Mango flashing in and out of view like a trick of the light. From Butter’s perspective, it was a blur of petals and impossible speed.

  Suddenly she was right in front of her. No slingshot. No smile.

  Mango, for all her psychosis, understood mechanics. The Sonata gemstone created a perfect, reactive barrier. It deflected kinetic force outright and dispersed magical energy, neutralizing it. She'd seen the principle in advanced Syndicate armor. A direct magical assault, like her rot, would be identified, resisted, and would give Butter a crucial moment to counter-attack.

  So she didn't attack the shield.

  Instead, she turned the rot inward. As her bare hand shot out, black decay bloomed under her own skin, a controlled, self-inflicted contagion. She wasn't projecting an attack; she was making her touch inherently corrosive.

  She touched the shield. The gemstone, reading no incoming hostile magic, no external kinetic force, didn't recognize it as an attack. It was just… a touch. A touch that burned with a contained, internalized death.

  SHHHHHHRIP—

  Butter screamed, leaning back. The magic shield didn't shatter; it was consumed from the point of contact, burning away under Mango’s self-rotted touch. Her hand was darkened, the black decay spreading like a contagion up her own wrist. The amulet itself sizzled, the enchantment overloading.

  With a triumphant yank, Mango tore it off.

  She teleported again in a burst of petals, landing lightly atop a road sign, spinning the violet gem on her finger like a trophy.

  “Mine now!!” she sang, hopping in place like a child who just won at carnival games.

  Butter stood in the center of the bridge, breathing hard, exposed. Harmony lowered slightly, for the first time uncertain.