Westport and the Country Club Plaza both screamed underneath Overland Park as she rocketed eastward into the city. She was aimed loosely at Liberty Tower. Didn’t come here too often, but she knew Union Station was right next to it. That was all her churning mind bothered to remember right now, all it really needed.
Sure enough: there it was, just past the Crossroads. The colossus which once serviced travelers the whole country over came to prominence in front of her. She blinked water out of her eyes as she neared, gritting her teeth. She could already see those shitheads on the roof, talking, talking about her, talking about how they’d get her out of the way, fuck them, fuck the whole place, she’d tear it apart with her bare hands, she’d burn it to the ground.
With a crack like thunder she careened into the crest of the stone rooftop, shattering glass skylights and sending bits and pieces of the edifice flying all around her. From down near the edge of the rooftop they looked at her, and she almost wished they were already dead but for the chance to kill them now. “Having a little powwow? Talking about how else you can try to fuck me?” the red girl called out to them, power already flowing in her screaming voice.
To her credit, their leader didn’t balk at this intrusion. “You need to leave. Go back to your side of the state line or there’ll be consequences,” Kaycee belted stonily. The words fell flat, deadened in the rain.
In response, Overland Park held up Lenexa’s severed head. An empty vessel twice over, pale and drained of life and blood. “I think we’re past that already. Getting Cindy to off me is a bit cold, wouldn’t ya say?” She threw the head as hard as she could at them; it struck the gable nearby and burst apart like a pumpkin, showering them in bits of skull and slacken flesh.
The Missouri girls suddenly had weapons gripped in their hands. God, they were posing like a big team of fucking jackoffs . Seeing them all lined up to try and fight her was a sickening insult.
Kaycee alone held off, stepping forward. She was visibly shaking, her face slowly pitching red. “We had nothing to do with that. How dare you-–”
“Yeah, right. Just like you don’t have anything to do with all the REST of the girls you’ve been sending my way the last month, you fucking coward shithead BITCH. BITCH!”
“You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“What EVER. This is all bullshit. I’ve had enough of you assholes chilling out over here, waiting to claim my place as your territory.”
This was going nowhere fast. Kaycee summoned her bat wordlessly in her right hand. In the left she held a plain baseball.
Overland Park coughed up a disbelieving bark. “The fuck you gonna do with that? Do you have any idea–”
She was interrupted by a sharp crack , a solid wooden report that was followed by a strange ripple in the air near her head. She had seen it, if only for a second. Rain in the path of the ball splattered violently, not having time to get out of the way.
“You have one last chance to get the hell out of here. We’ve always stayed out of the affairs of the Kansas girls, I’m begging you not to fuck that up for everyone.”
“YAWN.”
Kaycee grit her teeth, summoning another baseball and lobbing it up into the air. Then another, and another. Like the routine of a practiced juggler she tossed ball after ball up into the rain, and with perfect timing she followed each with a strike that slammed it with deadly accuracy straight at the girl from Overland Park at hundreds of miles per hour.
Crack, crack, crack. Water caught in the way was pounded forward too, making it harder to see. Didn’t matter much for the girl in red. Not bad, she admitted, dodging each cannon shot fluidly. It was the strangest shower she had ever gotten, lithely shifting right and left and back again.
Then she caught one. It wrenched her shoulder back, just a pinch. She held up and crushed the ball in her hands, squeezing it until its innards popped out between her fingers, cork and string and leather liquefying under the sheer force.
None of the other girls had moved this entire time, an implacable line behind their leader, though a couple of them were visibly shaken… especially Raytown, in a silver negligee. Kaycee grimaced. “If that’s how you want it, fine.” She fished in her back pocket for something, muttering. “Let’s see how you handle this, asshole.”
She tossed up a lumpen mass, Overland Park couldn’t tell quite what in the rain. When it came down, the bat hammered forth yet again.
Instead of one crack there were several all at once that sounded more like a pow! , and even Overland Park was not fast enough to see any of them this time.
Flecks of glass, slivers of it shredded all over her skin at once. She gasped in genuine surprise as pain flaired all across her body, thankfully missing the ruby at her navel. What in the fuck was that?
There was no time to investigate as another burst flew her way, imperceptibly fast as they tore into her clothes and flesh. She covered her soul gem with one hand and leaped forward at top speed.
She was forced to slow down immediately, couldn’t keep the rain out of her eyes as long as she was protecting her gem, and her movement signaled a volley from the rest of the Missouri girls too.
They didn’t exactly have much to offer: the only one of real note was wearing a duster and a hat, wielding an oversized revolver that roared over and over as it fired bullets the size of golf balls at her. That would be Lee, she supposed… still, Overland Park was too fast and the rest weren’t landing their shots.
It was sufficiently distracting that she wasn’t making much progress either. The gap between her and Kaycee wasn’t closing fast enough and the hand covering her belly was quickly being torn to shreds with each wave of shot.
This was pissing her off, badly. She changed tack, without a care for whether she could see she put on a burst of speed and reversed, throwing off their aim and dodging the last volley. Bleeding all over, turning her red like her clothes, she ducked down on the other side of the sloped gable of the Station, just barely out of view.
It took a few seconds for the sound of cannon fire to stop, which she used to focus. She was working herself up into a froth. These guys had a bit of fight in them after all, more than she expected.
She gritted her teeth as she dug into a cut on her left arm, prying the flesh apart with her fingers. She ignored the screaming of her ragged muscle and dug out a chunk of whatever she had been shot with. Holding it up to her eyes… It was glass. The fragment was round on one end.
Dime store marbles turned into grapeshot. That was a first, but if they wanted her out of the picture it’d take a hell of a lot more than that.
Overland Park bit her lip hard and the taste of copper flooded her mouth. She built up that fury, feeling it saturate her muscles and all her wounds. These stupid bitches thought they could take her on? They thought they were tough? They didn't know the meaning of the fucking word. She heard one of them shouting at her or each other, she didn't care what was being said or by who.
She had had enough of their muscling in. She knew every fucking magical girl was like this, but she hadn’t expected them to get Lenexa on their side. That hurt .
Finally, when she felt like she was going to explode, she stood back up to look at the other girls and that's just what she did.
Her rage splayed out in front of her like crimson lightning, bright lines like tracer rounds which with grim, satisfying precision showed where her destruction would be meted out. Red hot, these lines instantly vaporized what raindrops came in contact with them: a billowing mass of steam threatened to obscure the field of war. They were screaming neon rockets, she was the launchpad for a million fucking nuclear missiles and they all had their targets keyed in. The Cold War would end here in the hot, boundless fury of a woman scorned, Armageddon in a red dress.
Sure enough, in the span of a second the roof of Union Station was completely covered in a hot fog, enveloping all of them and obliterating the world. The fighting crawled to a stand still, silence permeating as all motion and noise were swallowed in the white mass.
The breeze filtered it out little by little, revealing the fruits of her anger: several girls wounded, two of them fatally–she got the cowboy bitch right in her fucking face, there was a gaping hole on the right side that oozed brains. All their gems were intact, but whatever. The farm-themed girl was the only one left unscathed, but her annoying friend had taken a pretty bad hit in the shoulder. Despite that, it looked like the one in pink was doing all the reassuring.
One of Kaycee’s legs had disappeared, not torn off but simply evaporated. Her lifeblood spilled out of a burning stump in spurts onto the divots of glass and stone.
Overland Park huffed, allowing herself to simmer down a bit. She still wasn’t sure where their nasty little assassin was, but if it was going to be a problem there was nothing she could do about it. Might as well make the most of her time.
She flounced, flecking accumulating water and her own blood off her red dress as she sauntered over. Kaycee groaned and sweated as she tried to apply pressure and staunch the flow. Maybe Overland Park would cauterize it if she asked nicely.
But Kaycee was uninterested in being nice. “You ssstupid, fucking moron,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “Why the fuck did you do this?” Her face was growing paler by the second.
“Because you just don’t know when to quit, bitch,” Overland Park sneered. “I’ve had to play cleanup with your little saboteurs for weeks and I’m getting tired of it.”
Kaycee’s mouth gaped stupidly, but after a second she remembered she was bleeding out and started breathing heavily. “What the hell do you mean? ” Huff huff. “Are you talking about the Magic Force?! We’ve already been dealing with that shit for months!”
Huh. “Don’t lie,” Overland Park tutted. “You’ve been forcing other magical girls to do your dirty work, sending ‘em my way cuz you’re too scared to try and get at me yourself. Why would the army bother sending girls of their own if they wanted in?” There was that little seed of doubt again, an unusual feeling of unease. She wanted to be rid of it. “If it were this easy for me, they could probably get rid of you all in less than a day.”
“This is,” huff, “the fucking metro area. You think they’d occupy it with the military? The government doesn’t want anymore casualties, anymore unrest after last year.” Inhaling, a desperate suck for air. “Dipshit. They’ve been trying to infiltrate us too , they try to send a girl in to take us over from the inside every other fucking week!”
Overland Park frowned, her temper percolating again. The seed of doubt was pushing through soil. “Why the hell did you send Lenexa after me then?”
“I didn’t, she volunteered because you’ve been slaughtering your own girls for the last month!”
Her teeth bared as she prepared to snap back, but before she had the chance a strange and cloying sense of peace stole over her. She felt the power of her fury drain from her nearly instantly, and was mysteriously fine with that.
A look of placid calm stole over Kaycee’s face too. It hardly mattered that her lower leg was gone, she might have just woken from a nap.
Idly she wondered: what on earth was this shit?
Almost without thinking about it, feeling as if she was in a fever, she looked back over her shoulder.
There was a woman there, on the far corner of the roof. Not a girl, but a woman–-old at that. She was garbed in gray, so light it was almost white like her hair. She carried a scythe and a face bedecked with liver spots that practically shined, her eyes were so radiant. She stretched wrinkly, sagging arms out to them.
“In the name of God, I come to grant you all peace.”
Chapter End Notes
Special thanks here to gazemaize for looking at an early draft of the story. I had this scene mostly fleshed out but the thing Momo said at the end was fucking garbage. Absolutely embarrassing placeholder. gazemaize didn't offer me anything specific, but they agreed it was really bad, and I appreciate them for being honest.
Really, a lot of the dialogue felt stilted and unnatural early on, which I suppose is to be expected? Pigoseg's Savannah was very helpful in reminding me how a genuinely pissed character sounds, since almost all of the characters in Savannah are constantly agitated. Go read Savannah.