Chapter 230: Millions of Tiny Mirrors
I continued to watch Princess playing with her food, more than a little impressed with her deadly accuracy. Each time she struck out, she took her pound of flesh. Literally. She would slash out at the defenseless queen and pop whatever chunk she had taken off the other queen into her mouth.
"You are going to get indigestion," I called out. Princess turned her head and looked at me. I had gotten into a very comfortable position, leaning against the corridor wall, my ankles crossed and my arms folded across my chest.
Midnight mirrored my position on my right side while GA relaxed on my left. I would be willing to put any amount of money on the fact that GA was carefully studying the movements of the two queens, filing away their weaknesses as well as their strengths.
I didn’t know about him, but I had yet to see any weaknesses in Princess.
Princess hissed at me, blindly throwing out a paw and managing to rip flesh off of the other queen’s face. "Fine," I replied as if she had actually spoken to me. "I was just concerned that you might get an upset stomach. Who knows where that thing has been or eaten? And you know what they say; you are what you eat."
She seemed to pause at my words before turning her attention back to the failing queen. A final slap and the brown Istar queen’s head rolled to the floor. Looking at her snow-white paw covered in blood, she brought it up to her mouth as if to clean it. Quickly looking over at me, she lowered her hand and started to frantically shake it, trying to fling the blood off of it.
"Hold on," I said to her before turning to either of my guys. "Do you have a cloth or something?"
Midnight and GA blinked at me before Midnight handed me some leather type rag. I had no idea where he had gotten it, but I was glad that he had it.
Walking over to the Istar queen in front of me, I held out my hand, hoping that my armor would be good enough to protect me if she turned. She glanced at my hand for a moment before placing her dirty paw in it. Getting to work, I cleaned off her paw as fast as I could, conscious that the cloth I was using to remove the blood was smoking and turning to ash in my hand.
As soon as she felt that it was clean enough, she removed her paw and patted me on the head like I had done to Pumpkin. "You’re welcome," I said with a smile on my face, hidden behind my helmet.
Princess nodded her head and, in seconds, disappeared into the ceiling.
"Remind me to tell Ye’tab that the bright lights don’t seem to work on the queens," I grunted as GA and Midnight walked over to where I was standing. Letting out a sigh, I went back to wandering down the hallways of the Saalistaja ship.
The first of three queens was dead, long live Princess, and I was still required to be bait.
I had no idea where Pumpkin was, but I was hoping that he would be fine. I had a feeling that all of the smaller bunnies were killed by the lights streaming through all of the windows, and I really didn’t want my bunny to face that fate.
I would have to have a special floor for him on Jun Li with lower-level lighting so that he would be safe and happy for a long, long time.
With my brain starting on a downward spiral of how to best look after Pumpkin, I didn’t notice the red puddle of slime until I had stepped on it.
Lifting up my foot, I stared at the disgusting goop at the bottom of my boot. "Well, the wicked witch of the West is officially dead. Glad we didn’t have to drop a house on the little fuckers. That might have been awkward on the ship," I said with a sigh.
The fog was still quite high, but that was definitely a puddle of melted something. And I was going to assume that since the witch hadn’t made her way into outer space, the bunnies had melted as soon as they encountered the light. I cocked my head to the side as I dragged my foot along the floor, trying to scrape the goo off of it.
I would have thought that the fog would have given them some type of protection, but then I remembered that, technically, light bounced off of the fog as it acted as millions of tiny mirrors. Which meant that anything that was trying to use the fog as a form of cover, it actually did nothing but speed up their deaths.
Wrinkling my nose, I continued on my way, ignoring all the times that my foot slipped from stepping on the puddles left by the bunnies.
"Do you think that Da’kea and the others are having any luck?" I asked with a sigh. I needed a new song in my head, and I needed one fast. Unfortunately for me, the only one that was coming to mind was ’Hoist the Colors’, and singing that in this atmosphere was creeping even me out.
Oh well.
"The king and his men stole the queen from her bed..."
There was a scream just before the head of a second queen fell at my feet. My heart rose to my chest, worried that it might have been Princess, but this one looked to have a mixture of black and brown fur with lighter streaks of tan acting as highlights.
"Is my singing really that bad?" I asked, raising my face to the ceiling just in time to see the bright white of Princess’s head staring down at me. She narrowed her jewel blue eyes at me before pulling her lips back in a hiss. "Seriously? Everyone’s a critic," I grumbled, kicking the head away.
There was the echo of children’s laughter, and Princess ducked away, back on a hunt of her own.
"Hopefully, the other three have managed to get their own queen because something tells me that Princess isn’t going to give them a chance to claim a kill."
