Chapter 4-105: Tit for Tat (1/2)

Shiv didn’t jump or run when the car skidded to a halt on the street next to her. She did move away from the curb, and with a gesture sent her bag of groceries drifting off to the side.

Three Amazons piled out of the car, grinning and their fists armored up as they bounded quickly to surround her.

Shiv just watched them moving to hem her in, and backed up against the wall of Jutterby’s Flowers there. “Pryssia. What do you think you are doing?”

“Just sending a message on behalf of a client who wants to remain nameless,” the Amazon grinned, a stunning Slavic woman with the glowing skin, full figure, curves, and great health all Amazons had in common. She was several inches taller than Shiv, considerably more attractive, and far stronger.

“Is that so?” Shiv’s flat voice and eyes never wavered. Her fingers snapped, and she abruptly vanished from their encirclement, even as they were raising their fists.

“Damn it! How’d she Cast so smoothly?” swore Pryssia, whirling around, and looking up and about for a sign of her. “She couldn’t have gone that far! Where is she?”

On the other side of their car, flat on the ground, Shiv calmly cast the Vanish spell to follow up her Jaunt, and faded from sight.

As the Amazons fanned out quickly, the completely invisible Shiv sat up, flipping open their gas tank’s cover, unspun the cap, and removed a slender now-invisible vial from a reinforced sheathe inside her coat.

The seal on it was styrofoam. It dissolved in gasoline. She dropped it in seal-first.

She tapped it closed, and sprinted across the road, ignoring the traffic that was slowing to watch the three eye-catching Amazons in their revealing leathers and long hair and whatever they were doing.

She was heading down the alley on the far side of Miss Kalama’s tea shop when the car blew up behind her. The driver screamed, set afire by the explosion, and clawed her way out of the inferno that was engulfing the car. The stunned Amazons picked themselves up off of the ground and watched her burning body rolling on the street, trying to extinguish the flames eating away at her.

Shiv thumbed her phone, hit the speed dial, and waited for it to ring, which it did quickly.

“’lo?” Sama asked from the other end, and Shiv belatedly remembered Sama didn’t have any Caller ID programmed.

“Sama, I just had three Amazons ambush me in front of Jutterby’s, on behalf of someone who would prefer not to be named. I blew up their car and driver, but I’d rather not leave it at just that?”

“Eryllians?” Sama’s voice was very unfriendly, and Shiv could suddenly hear sounds of motion at the other end.

“Pryssia, Nona, and Sigrid,” Shiv confirmed.

“Ingrates. Be there in sixty seconds. If they run away, tell me the direction.”

Shiv had walked into the back of the tea shop across the street from the start of the fight, startling the women baking cookies there, and totally ignored them, since they were focused on the car that had exploded across the road. Shiv grabbed a muffin and filled her own cup of tea, left a ten on the counter for the startled server there, and sat down smoothly at the comfy table with the best view of the situation.

“They are giving their driver a healing Potion, she’s pretty badly burned.” She was speaking in Dwarven, nobody around her understood what she was saying... except the young dwarf stopping in for an early brunch run, probably from the accounting office down the road, based on how he was dressed. He gave her a curious look, she gave him a quintessentially dwarven shut-up-and-move-along gesture, and he looked away sharply, pretending he hadn’t heard anything.

Master Vrune’s was thataway, so Sama should be coming by..., Shiv looked up sharply from the ground approach, and her lips twitched into a hard smile despite herself.

---

Sama hit the back of the florist’s roof, jumped up again, and was probably forty feet in the air when she began her plummet, coming down right on top of the burning car blazing so energetically, golden hair trailing behind her like her own custom cape.

The glass that hadn’t shattered did so when she came pounding down upon it, smashing down the roof of the car to absorb her plunge, and causing glass and fire to scatter even further in all directions.

The three Amazons bolted to their feet at the crunch of the impact, bracing themselves when they saw someone standing in the middle of the flames of their ruined car.

Sama came down the windshield, golden hair swirling in the heat, punching her foot through the remnants of the glass without a care, and leaving solid indents in the hood as she stepped forwards.

“Pryssia and her kittens,” Sama mused aloofly, watching the Amazons tense up as golden lights coalesced over her fists, doubling their size and more. “Someone who would prefer not to be named paid me to come over and deliver a lesson to you.” She slammed her fists together, an action like pistons coming together, and the crack of it sounded very, very much like shattering bones. “You fucktards couldn’t get it in the ring and wanted more of me outside of it. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to give up your contract.”

Her smile was very, very wide, displaying all eight canines.

The driver was on the ground, but the worst of her burns had been healed away, and she started to reach for her shoulder holster.

“Please draw that gun,” Sama purred, and a deadly two-tone quavering series of notes rose as Tremble slid out a few inches by herself from her back-sheathe.

The hand going for the gun froze.

“Tremble, She comes!” Sama laughed, coming right in on them without the slightest hint of fear, her terrifying cackle seeming to throw all the bones on her face and her teeth into relief as she went at them.