One thing you should never do is put your back to an enemy.
If you have to, then you’d better make sure they’re truly and unequivocally unable to fight. There are no rules of war when one side is desperate. There is no gentleman’s agreement in real life that prevents the spiteful and hopeless from flipping the table when they’ve lost.
You can only hope that when they do flip the table, it doesn’t affect the bystanders, or worse, the very person you were fighting for in the first place.
In that respect, Xena was one lucky motherfucker.
It wasn’t Dinah who got shot in the next moment.
A combination of being the pink ‘elephant’ in the room drawing everyone’s attention, Krieg’s kinetic manipulation aura disturbing the surroundings, and Xena covering up 50% of her body led to a rifle shot that caused far more damage than it should have.
With her back turned, she felt the shot before she finally heard it. Her powers being reduced by half meant that the otherwise insignificant .223-inch diameter bullet carved a shallow line across her side, drawing blood instead of just scratching her skin. The same blood that was so caustic it could chew through starship hulls.
The green ichor splattered into the air and, due to Krieg’s field, flew toward his feet, coating his black jackboots and pockmarking the road around them.
He stumbled back as the liquid began to violently eat through his boots, the socks underneath, and then his tender flesh.
As soon as it touched his skin, the pain receptors scrambled their signals to his brain. But by the time the first ones reached him, the blood was already eating through his foot.
His scream of pure agony broke the silence that followed the gunshot. He fell on his ass as he tried to flee, his feet no longer working properly as they turned into gooey Swiss cheese.
He tried to drag himself across the ground as the mooks finally began to stir. Stormtiger was the first to arrive with aid, propelled by his aerokinesis.
“What the fuck did you do?!” he yelled, sending an air blade at Xena, who sidestepped it easily.
“It wasn’t me, you asshole! It’s Coil’s men!” Her fresh wound had sealed itself, but the blood that had flowed from it burned a line down her leotard.
She turned around just as another shot fired from the van, this time hitting a goon. The skinhead fell onto the road, bleeding from his thigh.
“Fuck this!” someone in the crowd shouted, drawing a pistol and opening fire.
“Oh shit. Dinah!” Xena panicked as bullets began impacting the underside of the tipped-over van. She instantly flew toward it. Though it hurt, she didn’t dodge a single bullet from either side. The impacts caused her blood to spill across the road, giving it a cratered, lunar look. But she didn’t stop. She wasn’t about to have her plans ruined because some asshole got lucky, or rather unlucky, and hit Dinah.
The pain from the now several bullet impacts gave her an awful time as she threw a punch at the bastard firing from the van’s sliding side door, now the ‘roof.’
Xena saw his eyes briefly widen before her fist impacted the side of his helmet, and then punched through it, caving in his skull and sending his corpse into the doorframe. The force sheared his neck’s spinal column and dented the van.
Her blood hissed as it ate through the bottom of the van and her recent victim’s body.
Not wanting to melt Dinah, Xena flicked her hands free of acid and bent into the opening to find the prepubescent thinker. She immediately started to sink as her blood began eating through the van floor.
She spotted Dinah’s form secured to the floor, surrounded by blood spatter but none of it was hers. Even better, the pistol rounds from the Empire gangsters didn’t have the punch to penetrate the reinforced floor.
Xena quickly pulled off the straps from Dinah’s harness and pulled the drugged child into her inventory.
She kicked off from the van just as another round impacted her thigh.
She was getting really irritated by the constant gunfire. When another bullet grazed her neck, she snapped.
“Fuck you guys! You just had to keep shooting!” she yelled at them, watching Krieg being dragged toward one of the vans. They were withdrawing, but slowly. Her new outfit was wrecked. Bullets tearing holes through it, her own blood melting jagged lines into it as gravity took over.
She had tried to be civil. She’d morphed into a human appearance. She even put on clothes. But as soon as she got shot, suddenly they were acting like she planned to get her blood on the fascist.
She had secured Dinah. That should’ve been all she came for.
Now? Now she wanted payment in flesh.
And lo and behold, twenty feet of woman in valkyrie fetish armor. Like a female barbarian ripped straight from the mind of Frank Frazetta.
And Xena liked.
She began to grow to her true size, shedding the remnants of her pink outfit. Even in her queenly regalia, she was still shorter than Fenja. And she likely would be for a long-ass time, the twins were said to get as tall as Leviathan, if not taller.
As the scraps of pink sloughed off her form, the pistol-caliber bullets had less and less impact, until she reached her full height and they merely left trails of lead streaked across her black carapace.
She pointed one large taloned finger and, with a dramatic flare, declared in a loud, booming voice. Her lips pulled back in a hissing snarl:
“YOUR SSOUL ISS MINE!”
The declaration made Fenja take a step back. The gangoons finally ceased firing.
Xena swept her outstretched hand aside while curling her remaining three into an invisible grip.
“YOUR SSISSTER’SS WILL BE NEXST!”
Her barbed tail cracked through the air, punctuating her words like a whip.
The neo-Nazi valkyrie yelled out a challenge as she charged the smaller Queen, shield out front like a battering ram and short sword in a ready grip.
Xena met her charge with one of her own, her taloned feet and stiletto-like heels causing more property damage with every full-force step.
She lowered her body, arms splayed wide. Their bodies collided with a crash that sent shockwaves through the street, knocking bystanders off balance.
Xena’s upper arms came around the shield in a bear hug that pinned Fenja’s to her chest. The lower hands had a different objective.
One speared toward the giantess’s sword hand, grabbing her wrist. The other gripped her belt.
Fenja tried to lean back and break the hold and might have, had she not forgotten about Xena’s dexterous tail.
It wrapped around her ankle and yanked it out from under her center of gravity, leaving her wide and off-balance.
With a heave that cracked the road beneath her heels, Xena bodily lifted her opponent a few feet off the ground, then slammed her down with earth-shattering force, knocking the wind out of her. Her sword clattered away.
Gunfire from the mooks, and the alabaster-skinned cape, went ignored as Xena mounted the taller woman, pinning her to the ground. She ripped the shield from Fenja’s grasp and hurled it off.
As the shield left the twenty-foot woman’s distortion field, it shrank. From something the size of a kiddie pool cover down to a normal small shield.
