“Show them what we think of their trade.”
Confirm.
The club is not overly large, a flat and open space approximately 1393.54 m² standard to a small docking bay or similar factory business. The dismal, sloppy ceilings impress a warehouse atmosphere and provide no hiding places in additional upper floors or catwalks. The smoke and lights create disorientation/cover. With the main point of egress locked behind them, it is, as the species-offensive colloquialism goes, a barrel of fish.
Foxen advances right. He uses the bass of the booming, marrow-vibrating music to mask each silenced shot. Six, smooth in a salvo, for six bodies there around the sabaac table where a Twi'lek adolescent approximately age 8-14 dances for businessmen with tears in her eyes she has not yet learned to mask. She freezes and visibly pales at the blood spraying, looking around for supervision, then when no one comes, darts over and kicks one corpse in its destroyed face and then crotch repeatedly.
Good kid.
The Nautolan waves to catch her eye, purposefully stepping into a beam of colorful, strobing light. He points to the bar and makes a ducking motion— sending her to the doors will only soon get her crushed in the panicked stampede. She hops off her perch and runs.
- Not every organic in here is going to be a slaver, but none of them are innocent, not even mere employees swallowing bile at the only available source of income. He thinks of Flyndt when selecting an appropriate target, choosing to forebear on lethality for at least some of the occupants. Summary executions if they try anything or if they turn out to be more dastardly will not be difficult later: two shots to the skull or a beheading will suffice.
Kneecaps, in 97.98% of bipedal species, are an excellent target. Very effective.
He turns eleven more kneecaps into memories before the chaos erupts properly. After all, the Keibatsu makes no such effort at subtlety tonight like he does; she just strides imperiously down to one table playing dijaark, draws a flaming, ichorous sword, and bisects a Toydarian from neck to naval. The head slides down through the blazing blade. A swivel of her weapon stuck deliberately in the table through a drink causes a burst of evaporated flame, and then the fire is merrily eating over game pieces and viscera-coated linen.
Flames are like kicking a killik nest. Somebody screams, and finally others notice that the ongoing screaming of eleven kneecap-less goons on this side of the room isn’t part of the music or an orgy. En masse, patrons rose from seats or broke off of their dancing to scramble and shove towards the doors, crashing up against them in waves. Bouncers nearly his height wade through the throng, parting seas of flailing, sweaty skinbags, to make for the tiny female with a glowing sabre.
Red eyes met violet across the room growing increasingly filled with smoke. Flames burned in hers. A hunger.
- Foxen lifted his arms and signed large and simple to her: Leave the bar alone. Victims. Safe.
She saluted him jauntily with that sword, sweeping a luminescent court bow that cut through a gangster approaching her and laughing as she did so.
Reasonable, he decided. He hadn’t needed her tragic life story to persuade him to kill the monsters here. He didn’t care. But it did inform him. That she, too, knew what it was to be made into a thing. To be a thing for many years.
But they are not things anymore. They remade themselves.
And this, this is doable. To use their power to aid the powerless. To exterminate those that would make others into things. To do violence.
It feels welcome.
It is an anger so bright it feels like joy. Her sword spinning through the slaughter is sunshine. The crunch of the cranium of the woman he grabs by the face is a canticle. The trio of various aliens wearing shock collars that were her entourage pause, and he points them to the bar just like the child.
They run two different directions.
Oh, well.
A bouncer finally reached him, having had to pick through corpses and wriggling kneecapped worms, and the hybrid holstered his pistol and unsheathed his dagger.
Show them what we think.
He has a lot of knives.
Her blade swung, flame licking through flesh, sinew sizzling and smoke popping from boiled blood. Another body fell, and she laughed with it.
The little princess of ashes and embers. Burned and buried and glassed with her ancient home. Razed to bones, remade. This was what was left.
The Keibatsu pirouetted into a lunging stab that impaled one beefy bouncer through the kidney. He pulled off of it and kept moving, slow to bleed, like a stuck–
“Pig,” the tiny woman hissed, blood not her own in her mouth. Him and all these beasts, they would burn for what they did.
With a leap of rage-fueled, preternatural power, Mihoshi kicked off the filthy floor and swung, level with the man’s sternum. His head did not fall from his torso; too thick at the neck. Rather, her blade lodged somewhere past his trachea, and the wash of blood sprayed everywhere. His cranium lolled to the left when she landed and yanked her weapon free. The ichorous fire licked up its feed, burning all it touched. She stabbed the body again, not to be sure, but to kindle the blaze–
Clang!
A metal scream resounded as a dagger impacted her sword, barely an inch from impaling her hand on it. She looked up sharply to see Foxen Erinos well across the club floor, on his side, glaring at her as his arm lowered. His words were formed like bullets, sharp and shooting, a six-chambered round of reproachful gestures.
-
YOU ARE SPREADING THE FIRE TOO FAST. I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE THE BAR ALONE. NOW LOOK. Of all things, the Keibatsu could not say she had expected one of his reputation to be yelling at her over casualties. He wasn’t wrong, though. Now that she had paused in her fervor, she could see that the fire was spreading rapidly, and with the perhaps only exit already blocked by the piling bodies that had tried to flee out of it and found it barred, there was no easy egress.
The flames were also steadily eating towards the bar area, where several faces peered out of hiding. Some were innocents chained. Some could be slavers. What was worth it, on balance? She’d already burned once. What was once more?
Suddenly a dark shape, looming as if from deep water, was upon her. Her blade was up in an instant, a killing strike, but again metal rang and screed as it slid against a blood-coated length of beskar. Foxen growled at her, shrugging her off, his strength in that rolling of his shoulders alone enough to force her to stumble back and disengage.
Get your shit together! he snapped, and then drew another knife and launched it straight over her head.
.
The small woman growled softly under her breath. He was right, of course. But, she had just been having so much fun with it. The knife thrown over her head didn’t worry her and the satisfying sound of someone falling over with it - very probably - in one of the very tender, lethal places lightened her spirits a bit.
Fine, fine, she flicked with her free hand, turning back towards her intended location.
The small droid beeped and whistled as it jumped up and clung to the back of her coat, scanning the room. It whistled a few more times to get the Odanite’s attention after she cut down another “patron”.
“What is it, Bee?” She asked softly, still moving quickly between enemies carefully making sure they fell on any flames her sword started as she listened closely to the beeps and whistles of the small backpack droid.
“Oh, that’s a good idea. Get on it, please.” With the request - or command, depending on how it was viewed - the droid hopped back down gave a happy little tippy tap and ran off towards the bar area.
“Maybe that will keep the giant from yelling at me again.” She thought to herself. Foxen was exactly intimidating, very few actually were to the small woman. She had been this short her entire life so far and there wasn’t much hope of being taller, which meant height and physicality were just things she had to accept. The rage that burned inside Foxen? That she understood all too well.
The small droid made its way to the bar area, whistling sadly at the flames for a moment before plugging into the SCOMP port behind the bar. It whirred and whined for a second before a burst of gas extinguished the flames around the bar and the light above the main entrance clicked from red back to green.
There was the obvious obstacle of the dead before the now open door, but anyone who wanted out was free to try as bursts of gas from nozzles along the ceiling cleared a path in the larger areas on fire. Miho shook her head with a soft laugh.
The little droid was always very industrious and took an idea farther than it mentioned in the first place.
“Good job, Bee.” She said softly, even if the droid would never hear it. The cages of a place like this, where the merchandise was held, was usually below the main level and that was exactly where she was now headed.
.