By the time Fuyu reached the lead car, the rain was driving sideways through the air in sharp, short bursts. She saw ten black vehicles of different sorts, mostly sedans and coupes, but the rear was brought up by two SUVs. When the driver saw her in the path, he stopped the car and gave hand signals to the three people riding with him. They all got out, and quickly afterward the other vehicles began emptying. In moments, she was facing down over forty people with guns she'd never seen before. They had longer barrels, and several were equipped with drum magazines. As she glanced around, one man began to walk through the crowd. He was holding an umbrella, and by the time he reached the front of the pack, Fuyu had a fair idea of his identity.
“It was you?” he asked, his accent as thick as the rain in the air. His hair was salt and pepper and short, and he had a mustache. He was clad in a tailored, black pinstriped suit with a white shirt and red tie, and his gold cufflinks glittered in the headlights. “Well?”
She said nothing, instead busying herself with analyzing the scene. There were far too many of them for her to tangle with head on, and she wished she hadn't left the pistol on the stairway back at the farmhouse. When her eyes rested again on the Don, he spoke a third time.
“You killed my only son,” he said, reaching his empty hand out to the side. A lackey skittered up with a wooden box, which he opened and retrieved from inside a gun. The Don took it and pointed it at Fuyu, cocking the hammer with his thumb. It was a gold plated revolver, and it shone fiercely in the yellow glow. “This was to be his birthday present,” he said, his voice growing dark and angry. Another bolt came, and she could see the bitter hatred in his gray eyes. “Now it will be the instrument of my vengeance!”
He wasted no time in firing a shot, and Fuyu dove to her left, tearing across the path and toward the nearest row of trees. Behind her, she heard a yell to open fire, and all manner of ammunition flew at her as she ducked behind a trunk. Quickly, she checked herself for hits and found herself to be unscathed, although as she patted around another bullet from earlier expelled itself from her flesh. She muttered unhappily as rounds struck the wood behind her, and with the next flash of lightning pursuers became apparent. She took off again, trying to string the group out as much as possible.
“Bring her to me!” she heard the Don command loudly. “I want her alive!”
Three people were the closest to her as she ran. She lead them on a wild chase through the trees, never going in a straight line for more than a second. Occasionally, a bullet would strike the trunk next to her as she weaved about, but after a couple of minutes the shooting stopped.
“Where the hell did she go?” the woman of the bunch asked, her machine gun against her shoulder as she aimed it around.
“I dunno, just keep your eyes open,” a young man replied, brandishing twin pistols as he scanned his surroundings. Not ten feet away, Fuyu peeked out from behind a tree and loosed two swirling snakes in their direction, running them through their skulls and dropping them where they stood. The third member of this little group had his back turned, and had no idea what had just happened.
“I guess Stormy was right about this chick, huh?” he asked, waving his gun around in random directions. “Guys?” As he turned and saw them on the ground, Fuyu darted out into the empty space and slammed her bladed palm into the side of his head, snuffing him out in an instant. She was unable to rest, however; voices clamored all around her, and dozens of beams of light pierced the rainy dark. She stuck around only long enough to grab the dead woman's machine gun off the grass before moving on again. It wasn't long before she ran into a group of five more, walking beside each other in tight formation with their weapons pointed out in all directions.
“Stay frosty,” a tall man said. “I don't care if he wants her alive, I care more about staying that way myself.”
Fuyu leaned out from behind a trunk as they passed by and sprayed them with the machine gun. She was stunned momentarily by the immense recoil, but her grip tightened up and dampened the shaking enough for her to devastate them efficiently. The noise brought attention, however, and she had to start running again as incoming fire arrived. She encountered a group of four after about a minute of evasive maneuvers, almost running into them head on. She sprayed them too with her stolen weapon, and for reasons she had no time contemplate let out a maniacal laugh in the act. The remainder of his forces were beginning to hone in her location, and upon looking back she found over a dozen of them now following and shooting at her. Two bullets found their mark, and she slid behind a tree to rub at her bleeding shoulder. The rain came again, a driving, bitter assault of flying water that reached her even under the branches. Soaked to the bone, she found her body fighting both the wounds and the cold. The dull encroachment of exhaustion began to fray the edges of her mind.
“This is bad,” she murmured. Two people came around the trunk to engage her; she unloaded several rounds into the woman on the left, while the man on the right met his fate at the end of a black spike through his neck. Fuyu ran again, peeking back and grumbling at the increasing numbers. It seemed like they were all on her trail now, hollering and shooting and adding stress to her weariness. She took to pointing the gun over her left shoulder and shooting it at random, listening for hits. Based on the yelling, she wounded at least three, but their return fire was a withering wall of lead and brass. She had to hide again after taking three more bullets, panting heavily as she pressed herself against the tree. “Very...very bad,” she groaned, the pain wandering through her body in slow, unrelenting waves. They had her surrounded, and were coming around the tree in pairs and threes. Fuyu raised up and started shooting them as they appeared, or lancing them with writhing black ropes, but a few managed to shoot her. They finally stopped coming, but the damage had been done. She dropped to one knee, gasping for air.
“Isn't she caught by now?” she heard the Don say, his voice approaching. It gave her an idea. There was a sizable pile of corpses that she had dispatched; she decided to bury herself and hide until she could recover. It took all her waning strength to lift the bodies enough to insert her frame into them. Just after she fell still, muffled footsteps reached her ears.
A man spoke. “Holy hell! She's killed half our guys, chief!”
The Don replied. “I do not care, I want her found at any cost!”
Fuyu very gently shifted around in the pile, wincing at the pain that continued to flood her senses. The bullets were indeed the heavier caliber, and they were doing a number on her despite the black sludge's best efforts.
A woman chimed in next. “She must have run again. Damn it! We'll never find her in this rain!”
“I will have your heads if you don't! Get to work!”
Fuyu noticed she was face to face with one of the people she'd killed, and without a second thought bit into his cheek and began chewing. She would need the energy. As the bloody taste filled her mouth, her stomach took over and began guiding her hands. She still managed to be quiet, slicing off inedible clothing with black blades, but she ate like she'd never eaten before, tearing chunks of muscle out with her bare hands and ramming them into her mouth as fast as she could. She only paused once in a while to take a painful gasp of air. By the time she had stuffed herself to the point of vomiting the crimson mess back up, she ceased moving at all and laid there, listening for signs of what was happening outside of her flesh fortification. It was absolutely quiet; so quiet, she was suspicious. Suddenly, a scream came and went, growing and fading in volume in the space of twenty seconds. More footfalls went by, heavy and numerous. People were running. After they vanished, she poked her head out of the pile and looked around, her face and hair soaked red with blood. Nothing out of the ordinary presented itself at first until she realized it had stopped raining. The tree branches were statue still.
“What?” she whispered, swiveling her head around. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, casting a pinkish glow for miles. That's when she saw it.
The giant, rotating cloud.
People came flying past her, throwing away their weapons and running for their lives from the roaring tornado. Fuyu yanked herself free of the victims and began to follow them. Even in her weakened state, she was still faster than most of the Don's people on foot, and as she caught up to each in turn, she thrashed a bladed whip against their heels to sever their Achilles tendons and send them tumbling to the ground, shrieking in agony. Normally she would have let them be on their way, since they weren't actively shooting at her. To her surprise, the attacks came almost as easily as reflexes. Her sympathy had exhausted itself.
In short order they were all on the path again – what was left of them, at least – and they were piling into the closest vehicles in an attempt to escaping the oncoming cyclone. Fuyu's eyes darted about until they landed on one of the large SUVs. She saw the Don getting into it, slamming the door and screaming something she could not decipher.
“No!” she hissed, summoning what sludge she could spare and molding it into items which resembled ancient caltrops that stuck to her palms. She launched herself at the vehicle with one mighty thrust of her legs and threw the spiky things at the right side tires, puncturing them. She landed with a harsh thud on the roof, and slammed her palms down onto the metal to glue herself to it.
You will do what needs to be done...tornado or not.
She nodded firmly at her mind, gritting her teeth at the inertia transferred into her arms as the SUV began to roll. It didn't get far, only making most of a u-turn before its right side rims sank uselessly into the muddy road. She could hear the Don yelling at the top of his lungs in some language she didn't understand, but the raging wind quickly became her greater concern. The lumbering gray funnel bounced along the hills, and in the scattered lightning she could see the trees and shingles and who knew what else swirling in its grasp. For an instant, she worried about Stormy, but the tornado was coming from south of the farmhouse. She could only hope it still stood; even if it did not, she had business to attend to.
“This ends, now,” she wheezed, inhaling a mighty breath and dismissing the glue from her palms. She rubbed the roof and placed her ear against it, trying to figure out where in the car he was sitting. She determined he was almost directly under her, but to the left, and sent all the available sludge to that hand to form a spike hard enough to pierce the steel and kill him before the storm arrived. The act caused her to wail in agony as the black buffer between the pain and her mind left, but she concentrated on the soothing tone of the formless figure that lived in her head.
“Do...what...” she struggled, sliding her hand back in place time and again as the swirling gusts knocked her around on the roof. “Needs to be...”
Those were the last words she uttered before another ragged claw of lightning showed the angry funnel barreling right at her. Wide eyed, she loosed the black sludge and glued herself to the car, wrapping her hands, arms, and torso completely in the ebony gunk. The car soon slipped the bonds of gravity, tumbling upward into the air. Even if she had the inclination to scream, the tornado wouldn't spare her the air. Objects of every shape and sort flew by as the car flipped and spun. She saw a cow zip by, nearly colliding with the car as it went. Sections of roofs of all sorts shattered as they were flung around by the air. There was another car; Fuyu compared it against those of her friends as it approached and then departed in slow motion, rotating lazily like a top. It was green, and a truck. Under any other circumstance, she would have sighed with relief. Telephone poles came by in waves, like giant wooden darts that twice narrowly missed recording a bull's eye on the SUV. All the while, lightning flashed, warped and twisted into a white and pink swirl outside of the rotation. Forever passed, then passed again, until the flying sensation left. Falling took over. As they emerged from the cloud, a lightning strike informed Fuyu that they were on the other side of the highway from the orchard, a vast space with sparse trees and endless, tall grass.
They were also plummeting roof down.
She could only guess at how high they were above the ground, using the spotty light from the storm above her to determine when to attempt her leap of faith. After one more finger of electricity streaked across the sky, she went, sucking all the goo back into her with a loud slurping noise and pushing herself away from the roof of the tumbling SUV.
She detached too early, falling through the air like a stone for several seconds. It was too dark for her to attempt to fling a black rope at the ground to reel herself safely in, and even if she could gauge the distance she lacked the strength to launch the implement. All of the sludge was rolling around inside, stationing itself in preparation for the catastrophic injury it – and she – knew was coming. The SUV landed first, emitting a massive crunching noise as it slammed into the earth. Fuyu met the ground three seconds later, landing back first on the grass.
The white mist of her mind vanished, replaced in totality by a gaping maw of black.
At first, Fuyu didn't understand what the little glittering dots were that were scattered all over her sight. She didn't pay them much attention at first; right now, her main concern was figuring out what worked and what didn't. The black goo had forced all of its mass around her ribcage, spine and brain, absorbing the impact and shooting out of her palms like a spring uncoiling. The two tentacles entered her vision, waving uncertainly.
“Hello,” she breathed, smiling. She then turned her eyes back to the odd little dots. “What are you?” Her head tilted to the side a little, partially in curiosity, and partially because her mind wanted to know if her neck actually still functioned. As her body ran a self-check, the answer appeared. “Stars...”
The storm had moved on, leaving a crystal clear sky behind it. To Fuyu's left, the dawn was beginning to blue the sky, but its arrival was still an hour away at least. She squirmed as the sludge left its protective station around her most vital parts and began to flow, recalling the tentacles automatically to assist. That motion revealed to her that her legs and arms were completely shattered; all she could was lie on the wet ground and move her head to look.
“Pain,” she breathed again, her smile fading into an agonized frown.
You are hurt.
“Please help me,” she begged the voice, not knowing what else to do. Her eyes darted about and eventually fell on the obliterated SUV, lying in a crumpled heap off to her right. Something was moving around near it – something human-shaped and weeping. “Friend?”
You are weak. You need to eat.
“Hungry,” she wailed in response, barely even conscious of the noise she made. The sludge rebuilt her arms first, nearly from scratch, and she used them to lift her upper body into a stiff sitting position. The human form approached her.
“Shit,” it said, revealing itself as a woman as it knelt down by her. “Are you okay?”
“Everything hurts,” Fuyu whined in reply, trying to work the stiffness out of her new limbs. “Who are you?”
“See that car over there?” she said, thumbing back over her shoulder. “I was in that thing! Can you believe it? This has to be a sign or something,” she rambled, standing up again and running a hand through her green hair. “I'm going home to Trottingham and ditching this mob thing. The Don's dead, what do I care? I'd rather be in my sister's print shop. Seriously...how did I survive that shit?” She paused, looking down at Fuyu and gasping. “Sorry! Fuck, I am so high on adrenaline I can't even see straight. Are you hurt bad?”
A choking noise was all that escaped her lips. The black goo was rising up, leaking from her mouth at the corners, then flooding out and forming into a thicker version of the appendages that she could produce from her hands. The woman screamed with terror and turned, but the thing shot out and attached itself to her back, reeling her in as she thrashed and cried.
“You will be the new me,” Fuyu droned, her voice warped as if two of her were speaking. The black sludge forced her down into Fuyu's lap and held her there, hardening and softening itself hundreds of times as it shredded her jeans away and plucked bits of her flesh, ingesting them directly. The tissue traveled up through the ebony trunk and into the woman, where filaments of the black directed it to replace what it couldn't fix. It bound the donor material to her own flesh; once it began to transfer bone, the pain reached a level she could no longer tolerate. She fell back onto the grass, eyes wide and her mouth locked open in a silent, unending scream. When the agony finally departed, she could feel her legs again and sat up in a more normal position, wiggling her toes and staring at them. The sludge retreated back into her mouth, leaving the wheezing, half-eaten woman in Fuyu's lap.
“Help...me,” she coughed, her legs totally gone. They were now a part of the woman in black.
“Help?” she replied, tilting her head.
Eat.
“Hungry,” Fuyu automatically blurted out, nodding once firmly and getting to work. Gently, she raised the woman up and sunk her teeth into the green hair, biting down hard. She could feel twitches of pain under her bite, but paid them no attention. It was like the first time she'd ever consumed a human; each detail was hyperintensive. The blood tasted like warm iron as she gulped it down. The brain matter had an odd flavor, somewhere between metal and cotton candy and hope. The heart, which she tore easily out of the woman's chest, was a bloody, meaty thing. She took bites out of it like a sandwich, laughing and crying all at once after each swallow.
Fuyu.
“Hungry,” she scolded the voice, placing the woman's left hand in her mouth and biting down, severing the fingers and crunching on them happily as she cried.
Fuyu.
“Hungry!” She worked on the forearm now, breaking it off at the elbow and turning it in her hands like a corn cob.
Fuyu?
She didn't even bother replying. The liver was too delicious, sweet and squishy and full of all the lovely tastes Fuyu could only find piecemeal in other organs.
Fuyu?!
It was only as she sank her teeth into the skull again that she realized the source of the voice calling her name was not the formless figure within, but something above and behind her. She froze, the hair on the back of her neck bristling as she felt a certain kind of spark. With her mouth still latched on, she rotated her entire upper body to look. The beam of a flashlight lit up her bloody face, and she followed it up to the hand that held it, the arm to which it was attached, and the body to which that was stuck. She had to blink the crimson out of her eyes to discern the face. It was tanned, the eyes were a rosy color...
...and the hair was a random mess of colors of all kinds, that faded in and out with no rhyme or reason.
“Wh-what are you doing?” Rainbow Dash asked, her voice shaky and weak. Her wings flapped, moving her slowly backwards and away from the bloody scene. They stared at each other for a small eternity, until she decided to turn wing and fly. The motion was glacially slow to Fuyu as adrenaline flooded her brain, but that chemical wasn't the only thing rushing in. The unnecessary thoughts came back almost all at once; it was Rainbow Dash, her friend. No, wait, the girlfriend of her very best friend, one of the six. No, she was a friend too, and all of the other things that Fuyu now realized were no less necessary than the clump of frontal lobe she swallowed with a hard gulp. It was all going to end, she would be alone again, and that concept hurt her much worse than the fall from a thousand feet she suffered some hours before.
Those flowing cyan wings issued a mighty beat, and in that tenth of a second Fuyu made a choice to protect what she had, even if the cost was inconceivably high. She threw aside the mostly eaten corpse and raised her right arm, palm facing Rainbow's back, and launched a writhing strand of black that wrapped around her waist. Like a fisherman with a catch, she locked her elbow and swung her arm back as one, yanking the woman through the air until her back impacted against Fuyu's chest. Once it had, her left arm locked around her torso and held her there. She ignored the sensation of the magical wings slapping her fiercely, concentrating on the strength required to restrain the athletic woman.
“Let me go!” she shrieked, flailing her arms and kicking her legs. She dug her rainbow nails into the flesh of Fuyu's arm, but it didn't even draw a blink from the woman's eyes.
“You can't,” she said, beginning to weep. “I'll lose everything if you tell them! I don't want to be alone again!” she added, withdrawing the black appendage and wrapping her right arm around the woman's waist. “You don't understand what it's like! I tried not to do this!” she sobbed, the blood on her cheeks transferring to Rainbow's hair as she writhed in panic. “I have to eat like you, if I don't I'll starve!”
Rainbow was reaching the end of her strength, having expended it in an attempt to break Fuyu's steely grip. Weakly, she fell back against the woman and cried. “Please don't hurt me, please, Fu, it's me, it's Rainbow, please let me go...”
“I know it's you, that's why I can't let you go,” she replied, her iron grip loosening into a strangely gentle embrace. “I know it looks terrible. It is terrible. You must understand that I would never hurt you like this, but if you tell Applejack...I don't want to be alone,” she concluded, only able to repeat her greatest fear at the moment.
“Why?” Rainbow squeaked out. “Why are you eating that woman? I don't understand!”
“I have to feed the thing that lives inside me,” she explained, turning her left hand so her palm faced the sky. A black tendril emerged from it, swaying to and fro as if waving hello at the terrified Rainbow. “See it? That's my friend. It makes me strong, it heals my wounds, but it asks me to do awful things. That's what I've been doing. I've been hunting for five years, all over the country. To stay alive! I never took anyone when I wasn't hungry,” she insisted bitterly, trying to ignore the thrill she'd gotten from the wanton killing not so long ago. Rainbow shook violently in her grip, her weeping getting louder with each passing second.
“Don't eat me, please, please Fuyu, I don't wanna die!” she begged, struggling as best she could.
“I would never,” she replied, almost as loudly. “You six are my friends, the first I've ever had. I don't want to hurt you, at all. But I don't want you to go away because you think I'm a monster.”
“Y-you are!” Rainbow blurted out, then slammed her hand over her mouth. Fuyu became angry and tightened her grip, causing the athletic woman to squeal in pain.
“If I must lose one to keep five, I will,” she hissed into Rainbow's ear. A stream of muffled 'sorry' filtered through her hand, and she ceased her struggling. “That's it. We can find a way. I really don't want to hurt you. I really, really don't, Rainbow Dash. Let's be friends again, like we were before.” Multicolored hair flew around as its owner shook her head, and Fuyu growled. “I will do what needs to be done, do you hear me?!”
“No!” Rainbow screeched, flapping her wings again. Her effort fell useless against Fuyu's power, and after a minute she became still. “I have to warn them...I have to warn the town, I have to warn Twilight, I have to—agh!”
Fuyu slapped her heavy palm over Rainbow's mouth, silencing her, and sighed. “You are being difficult.” A muffled 'fuck you' reached her ears. “Of course you'd say that. I'm trying to be reasonable!” She felt a tiny pain as Rainbow bit her flesh, but ignored it. “Let's try again,” she grumbled, squeezing the woman harder. She yelped in response, falling still once more. “Good. I'm going to figure out what to do with you, with or without your help.” A threat to kill her leaked out between the fingers over Rainbow's mouth. “That's not very nice.” She sat there, holding Rainbow, and allowed herself to get lost in thought. The thrashing grew weaker until an exhausted Rainbow fell back upon her chest, choking out a series of pleading sobs.
“I have no choice.”
With Rainbow so tired, it was easy to bind her with black goo. Fuyu tried to tie her wings, and found they were just as solid as any other part of her body. She wrapped large coils of black around them, and around the woman herself, then picked her up and hefted her over her right shoulder.
“What are you?” Rainbow breathed, unable to keep her eyes open any longer. Fuyu did not immediately reply for two reasons. The first was the myriad of flashing blue and red lights she saw in the far distance; emergency vehicles running about town, no doubt. She wondered how badly it had been hit. The second was the question itself. She had lost count of how many times her soon-to-be victims had posed it to her. It had to have been in the hundreds. Sighing, she started walking, crossing the empty highway. She considered answering with the words Applejack had used, but they failed to bring the quiet happiness they once did. As she strode along, she found herself only able to reply with the truth as she now knew it.
“I am misery,” she said, weaving through the tall trees on this side of the road. “I am suffering.” She looked down at the back of Rainbow's blue tank top and shorts, which were now thoroughly coated with dull red. “And more often than not...” She paused, both her speech and her movement, to look through the woods. She could see the neatly arranged rows of apple trees not a quarter of a mile away. They felt like they were on a different planet now. With another sigh, she continued both actions.
“...I am death.”