It's you and me now, there's chaos all around // PG 6/10

“I CAUGHT YOU!”

Teles’ voice morphed into an animalistic shriek, roaring in Scout's ears above the howls of the wind, the blizzard still raging around them.

Where there had been a taller nyulop, with warm silver fur and inviting blue eyes, instead loomed that hulking, serpentine beast, with rows upon rows of impossibly sharp teeth aimed directly at her face.

Scout's relieved smile was gone, replaced instead by a horrified frown, staring wide-eyed into that gaping maw.

She needed to run. But she couldn't. 

The siren had… it had used Teles’ form to trick her, that had to be it. A cheap imitation. The cloth of her poncho had felt real, creased when her paws made contact with it. Her hair, billowing around them in the wind, her fur…

But it was a fake.

That had to be it.

They'd never seen a body, never seen the beast snatch Teles out from in front of them. Never seen the crimson splatter of her mentor's blood staining the snow. But did they have to see it? Perhaps the Siren was just that fast.

Scout's thoughts felt simultaneously too fast to keep up with, and too slow to make sense of in a reasonable timeframe. She was gripped in the arms of a monster twice her size, staring down certain death. 

The nyulop didn't have time to react. What could she even do?

Scout had always expected her death to be valiant. Protecting someone, fighting to her last breath, weapon in hand and bond at her side.

The stupid dreams of a worthless child.

There she was, face to face with death, alone. The frigid gales choking her up, icy claws in her throat. Nobody at her side but the monster that was likely to be the death of her.

She'd ran into its arms. It'd tricked her so easily.

Scout didn't know whether to laugh or cry, watching the rotating rows of razor sharp incisors looming ever closer to her face. 

What was taking it so long? 

Yet, while it felt like hours, she had an inkling of an idea that this was seconds. Perhaps her mind was slowing down time itself, allowing her time to process-

The sensation of millions of knives digging deep into her face and rotating.

Somewhere, distant, Scout heard a scream. An ear piercing shriek rivalling that of the beast currently tearing her face open. Was that Koma? She hoped he wasn't witnessing this, watching her meet a terrible, frankly pathetic fate. 

Yet her throat hurt as if she'd opened it, as if she was the one screaming, no doubt in her mind that her voice would be hoarse if she were to speak. 

She'd never get a girlfriend. Never leave this mountain. And Koma- oh, she hoped he'd look after Temper for her. Was her bond watching? Lamenting her sheer stupidity? Regretting her choice of bond?

Scout felt the unmistakable feeling of something falling away from her, that utter lack of something that should be there. She'd never experienced it before, beyond losing baby teeth - it was sort of like that, but elsewhere on her body. 

Something poked through the acceptance in her mind, a part of her confused as to how she hadn't yet died. 

She had to do something. 

The nyulop's body acted on its own. She felt her arm move, still gripping that dagger tightly, but didn't feel as though she'd moved it herself. There was a strange disconnect between thought and motion, mind and body - had something possessed her?

Whatever the cause, the dagger's blade met flesh, too slow yet too fast - time's passage was beyond her. She should've really given up on trying to keep track.

Something hot and wet dribbled down the blade to her hand, and in a swift motion she had pulled it across flesh and through the air, that hot liquid following with no resistance. 

That hot liquid she felt on her face, that she'd felt just the previous night after that Wraithel encounter-

Blood!

She'd made her assailant bleed, the fresh fluid still warm as it spurted from the opening she'd made in its…body, somewhere. She couldn't quite see, but she assumed a neck or limb.

Were it any other fight, a more equal battle between herself and a worthy opponent, she'd likely have taken the opportunity to taunt and laugh at them. In this instance, though, all she could do was watch hot breaths disperse in the wind, her own proof that she was still alive. The dagger finally slipped from her paw, the now free limb grabbing the nearest thing for some semblance of stability. It happened to be the beast itself.

It probably hadn't been enough.

She wasn't enough.