Snippet of Ballad of the Femme Fatale Chap 9
(IT LIVES. I don’t know if any of my Ballad readers actually read my blog so this proof might be moot but IT LIVES)
Hibari got thrown over the rooftop again for picking a fight with Mukuro when Skull continued to ignore him in favor of teaching the others, then Mukuro got thrown over the roof when he started intentionally trying to provoke Hibari when the Cloud returned —Silhouette told her to just give up throwing them and knock them out for a few hours, but Skull found throwing more therapeutic—. She was in the middle of explaining Silhouette’s controls to Chrome —delightful child, far more behaved and attentive than Mukuro— when the jet roared overhead. A civilian might have ignored it. Planes flew overhead all the time after all, and a low flying plane might just be having engine trouble and be coming in for an emergency landing somewhere. Except there was no nearby airstrip and the jet’s engine sounded as smooth as silk as it shot overhead far lower than a fighter jet had any reason to fly. Skull stilled mid-word, eyes tracing the jet’s path in the air —Sukhoi Su-27, what was one of those doing here?—, sensed Silhouette’s spike of paranoia shift to outright alarm as it circled back around toward them, “Skull, get the children inside. Now.” Skull yanked Chrome off Silhouette’s seat without hesitation, hissing at the Mist to get her Sky and fellow Elements into the safe house immediately even as she kept an eye on the jet’s —even lower— second pass, “Sil?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tsuna’s head snap upward to the jet and Flames surge up his arms with enough heat and urgency to make Hibari and Mukuro stop fighting and whirl to assess the incoming threat. Chrome ran for them, rising her usually shy voice to a shout as she told them to run while next to Skull, Silhouette’s engine began to snarl. The scream of two more jets’ engines as they spiraled out of the sky and into formation with the first jet’s third pass was enough to tell her that her day was about to go horribly wrong. The intimately familiar sound of metal plating shifting and rearranging into different shapes scraped across her senses and the earth-shaking thud of three sets of pedes landing in her yard was almost enough to distract from the splash of bright purple on their wings as the three mechs stood and turned toward the Tsuna and his screaming Guardians as one. Decepticons. Primus frag it to the Pit. Skull ran for the kids, snatching a large rock from the ground as she sprinted and behind her Silhouette erupted into a transformation of her own, blasters already firing before her legs finished forming. The decepticons whirled, wings rising like the fur of startled cats —they hadn’t expected Sil, why had they come if not for Sil?— and Skull’s teeth rattled from the sheer noise of the returned blaster fire. She slid to a stop next to frozen, wild-eyed Tsuna long enough to grab his shirt and physically throw him into the house through the nearest window. Gokudera was thrown next, dropping his dynamite in the process and the explosion as she kicked them away startled Yamamoto and Sasagawa out of their stunned stillness. Yamamoto’s sword gleamed with Rain Flames as it shed its innocent facade of a baseball bat and Sasagawa raised his fists, “What are those extreme things? Extreme!” “Something for me to deal with now get inside!” Hibari dived past her for the nearest decepticon, heedless of the blaster fire going on over his head or the grating insults in cybertronian as they began to spread out in an effort to surround Silhouette, who was surviving through acrobatic skill alone as she dodged blasts and retaliated while trying to lead them away from the safe-house and the kids. Hibari slammed his tonfa into the ankle of the nearest decepticon and Skull’s ears buzzed from the startled screech of pain as the metal —bullet proof, missile resistant, made-for-space alien metal— crumpled under the force of the tonfa deeply enough to cut some of the wiring in the mech’s pede. The mech kicked on instinct, sending Hibari rolling from the glancing blow even though the Cloud had dodged the kick enough to not die. Red optics —Sil’s color how dare they-how-dare-they— swiveled to look down, “Fragger-! These are the spark signals we were tracking? How did the little skin bags get spark signals?” One of the decepticons was fighting Silhouette servo to servo now, leaving the other free to glare at the dazed Hibari wobbling to his feet, “We’ll ask the autobot once we capture her.” The glare turned to a sneer as one blaster lowered to aim at the teenage Cloud, “Though maybe if we shoot one, we’ll get … valuable data. On if spark-carrying organics combust-” Sky Flames burned as Tsuna burst out of the house, a Flame dancing on his forehead as he bodychecked Hibari away from line of fire and raised his own hands in an X-Burner. Red optics widened as every cybertronian there twisted toward the feel of the Sky Flames and Skull heard one of the decepticons screech, “That feels like a-” even as the blaster still glowed with an impending shot —no time to kill, blasters could still fire after offlining if there was already an energon flow go for the arm-go-for-the-arm—. Skull pulled back her hand and threw the rock with as much Cloud Flames as she could pack behind it without disintegrating the object. The silence that fell when it the stone and its Cloud-formed copies punctured through the decepticon’s elbow and out the other side in a spray of energon and wiring was interrupted only by the sound of the mech’s blaster arm as it thudded to earth. Energon supply cut off, the shot faded without firing and the mech clutched at his arm stump with an uncomprehending expression. Skull took a deep breath, exhaled, “Hey. Pit slaggers.” The decepticons looked at her sharply and Skull drew two of her knives with a smile, pumping as much Killing Intent into the air as she could, almost smothering the feel of Tsuna’s Flames in her own —they thought his Flames were similar to something, she couldn’t let them take interest in him, she couldn’t let them survive—, “Surprise.”
