A Hunt in Heaven;
xmortifera:
Against the vast darkness of the cosmos, it often felt as though the only company to be had was the glimmer of distant stars. As social creatures, most humans would find such a thing maddening, but Samus thought it to be perfect solitude. The weeks prior had been a swirl of faces; clients, bounties, passersby, the characters of vivid memories filled with flashes and gunfire and the color of blood. It was a relief to get away, simply drifting under an endless canopy of darkness.
Her free time was spent getting lost in her own thoughts and resting–her Gunship was the only place she could ever seem to find decent sleep. The world outside of her aircraft had remained consistent for so very long that she hadn’t even realized her autopilot had guided her into another star system.
Urgent beeping of her comm. system was what caused her to stir. She was quick to awaken, prompting her seat to rise from its reclined position. Her eyes glanced over the radar display, where figures moved about frantically over the grid system. Investigating would certainly mean the end of her solitary relaxation, however, she couldn’t bring herself to ignore the disturbance.
The deactivation of autopilot and a push of the thrust lever sent the ship surging into the distance, turning her starry surroundings into a streaked blur. Peering into the blackness, she kept a close watch for any abnormal activity. She assumed that if there was any havoc to be found, she would find it before it found her.
How terribly mistaken she was.
Warning systems blare throughout the chamber as the ship is pulled into a nose dive. Having missed the cause of the presumed threat, she is reasonably surprised but composed nonetheless. Upon glancing upward she is met with strange radiance. Her eyes, once wide with awe, narrow once the light subsides. It is then that she realizes that her glass of her windshield has spidered, ruined by the force of a high heeled shoe. The hunter’s scowl only grows more severe as she realizes that owner of that shoe, who was posed so ridiculously on the nose of her ship, had the audacity to smile at her.
A lever is yanked harshly before the palm of her hand returned the controlersphere that acted as the ship’s wheel, rolling it backward until her vessel has slowed and steadied itself. Samus’ glare didn’t waver in the process. She maintained eye contact as her scan visor activated, the cursor and crosshair aligning over the woman’s face.
The data that returned to her is prefaced with the term umbra witch, which was not surprising to her—she couldn’t have been human, for reasons that needed no explanation. She is dead silent until she is done reading…and processing the level of absurdity that came to greet her.
❝Get your foot off of my windshield…❞ Her voice filtered through the ship’s speaker systems, level but sharpened by sheer disdain. ❝ And tell me whatever it is that you’ve just done.❞ Previously she detected no heat figures in the vicinity. Living creatures didn’t just simply materialize from drifting stardust, no matter how mystical they happened to be. While the supernatural was something she did not fully understand, she believed that there was always an explanation, a force the brought some degree of reason into the situation.
This had not been the first engine Bayonetta had defiled with her footwear, nor would it be the last. With her gloved fingers laced gently around her hips, the witch slowly curled her body upright once more. Her immediate focus, unfortunately for Samus, was not the damage she had caused, or the idle curiosity it spawned. Her gaze solidly met with pure darkness, pinpointed in the direction of the planet whose orbit she had been booted from.
Why had they played so seriously?… and were they done yet? A translucent curling of space which distorted the diamond filled sky answered that question for her. Sadly, boys never know when to quit.
Still offering absolutely no consolation for their meeting, Cereza kissed the very tip of her index thoughtfully, scanning her surroundings. How fortunate it was that the ugly rock she had landed on came equipped with large mounted guns on each side. That was the type of heavy artillery able to even any odds… how fiendishly delicious. “Me? I haven’t done anything. I’m but a sweet little star, hopping from comet to comet. No… I wouldn’t pay me any mind.”
Whilst it was traditionally forbidden to drag an outsider into the battlefield between realms… well, no one was going to catch her out here anyway. And Samus HAD asked her what she did, what better way than to SHOW her? Adding insult to the hunter’s lack of understanding, the witch immediately broke out into a slow dance, trotting to the very nose of the craft and raising her hand ahead of her. There, she dragged her palm full circle, and ahead the emblem of the Umbra Witches appeared. It embraced the hub of the drifting ship, curling inward like pool water and absorbing them into Purgatorio.
On the other end were Bayonetta’s opponents, and a wave of spears, all of which were headed directly towards the hunter’s ship! Even more of the demonic soldiers, creatures long lost in buried textbooks, began to fly in behind the first wave. “I’d worry about them. Do a girl a favor and– take care of them, would you~?”
Because now the witch was too busy attending to her knuckles to even bother to move out the way of the first strike.
