Tales Stranger then Fiction: The Headless Horseman (OPEN DE)

The blast, as intended, struck Celmaru instantly in the face; it was a mercy that he was so quickly knocked unconscious. Hopefully, should the medi-bot find his broken form in good time, he wouldn't be so battered when he woke up, but his face would be bruised for at least a few weeks if not longer. The kinetic energy of the glimmering white grenade was equivalent to several planetary government's worth of nuclear weaponry--in fact, it had four times the potential of the Mega-Nega Bomb that had blasted the literal tail off of Zucceta in North Capitol. After releasing the blast, Zucceta blinks--Noxa had somehow teleported again without even a spike of obvious ki.

The queen considers, momentarily, the pursuit of the woman--but she would leave. If Vi, or Zucceta, or even Bing Gan found her on the Earth again, or anywhere, really, with a trail of bodies--she would be a dead woman. She might grow stronger, become a greater threat--or she might change. Either way, Zucceta was excited, for the former her saiyan instinct, as controlled as it was, lusting for a challenge, and for the latter her image of the future, bright, suffering absent.

For now, though, that future was a distance away. The rain might have stopped but grey clouds still loomed.

"Did I make the right choice here?" Zucceta asks the azure android, referring to both Noxa's fate and to, well, her treatment of Celmaru. One was a murderer, yes, and the other just a moron--and she'd blasted the latter, while the violent bio-android slunk away to distant worlds.

Replace bio-android with 'saiyan' and the description fits you, hun, she accuses herself.

"Waterfield'll be fine. Maybe it'll knock some sense into him. The last time I ever did anything close to sparing someone was Bing Gan," she glances at his retreating figure, "if you can call what I did to him 'sparing'."

The puddles in the churned earth below were shrinking, water draining into earth. One day soon flowers might bloom here--no, they would. Zucceta would plant them. She understood what she needed to do.

Her head tilts to a mountain two-and-a-half miles directly east of the two remaining warriors and, just as the rays of sunlight broke through the clouds, Zucceta raised a hand. There would be a rumble in the distance before, from that mountain, a ten-metre tall, four-metre wide chunk of rock would fly, slowing before it reached the troubled queen. Floating in front of her, she would firmly tap it with one finger--lines of ki spill across its front before she taps it again. Excess rock crumbles away, and what was left was a memorial.

She lowers the rock to the ground, and with a firm psychic push she slides the monument into the Earth. Depicted on its front: a picture of the Neo Great Saiyaman, the costumed Tomoyo, with an inscription below: "Here rests a young hero, taken before his time, and still others who rest beside him."

She scratches the back of her head. "Yeah, job well done, I guess. Bad guy scrambling off. Feels weird being on this side."

And she tapped Vi-Poi's fist with her own robotic knuckles.



[Fin, from me at least. PL!]