lille aleyne, piece on the side. (rending) wrote in emillion,
Rictor/Storm/Lille
Water, water everywhere—these were not ideal conditions, but it was one of the few times Lille's slightness could serve her well. Without her armor and sword she was barely over 120 pounds of lean muscle and speed. She dove into the water, and again, and again, hauling out half-drowned men, a girl whose screaming mother immediately scooped her up, the waterlogged face of a messily bisected sailor who was already gone from this world, his blood-flecked face staring up at her, blind. She dropped him with a small gasp. There was no time to waste on dragging out the dead.
And then the wave came, tidal and sweeping, dragging her beneath in its undertow, and she was kicking out and slashing at the water with her arms—Storm and Rictor were gone—she slammed hard into the back of something and when she managed to fling herself to the surface, found herself staring at the great armored spine of an iron crab. It was an effort not to scream as a reflex, but someone else filled in the spaces.
"Run!" Storm yelled on the beast's other side. And, almost immediately, Lille screamed out, "Storm!"
She looked around frantically for anything she could use, wishing her sword was still around her waist, useless as it might have been otherwise. But there—debris from the ship, a small hunk of wood not unlike the one that had trapped Storm. She needed to get the crab to turn to her. She needed to get it away from Storm. "Rictor!!" she yelled, not even sure where the knight was in the fury of water and blood and bodies and beasts. Her hand grasped for a chunk of wood and, the potential consequences of her actions only occurring to her after the fact, she pushed as hard as she could out of the water and launched herself at the crab's back. She remembered these from training, those long months she had been required to learn monster after monster and its various defenses. Impenetrable shell; razor sharp pincers; weakness in the mouth and mandibles.
One arm curled around a flailing pincer as she brought the pointed end of her makeshift spear as hard as she could downward, aiming for the crab's mouth—but the creature was scuttling violently, and her grip was slipping, and with the chunk of wood lodged near the crab's mouth Lille found herself being flung through the air to land with an unceremonious splash near Storm, spluttering and bleeding from a pincer-made gash in her arm.