Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ A Shadow in the Twilight ❯ Chapter 8 ( Chapter 8 )

Chapter 8

According to what Adarath was telling him, Lluvia was an orphan, a casualty of an alien invasion that took place when she was only a handful of years old. The resultant trauma erased her precious memories of what went before, including her parents' faces and her home. Something snapped in her fragile child's psyche, causing her to become a feral little creature, surviving on sheer luck and her intellect, which was considerable given her age. She managed to escape her home planet as a stowaway on the invaders' supply ship until she could make a connection off a space station onto another outward bound ship, its destination unknown. The second ship, which turned out to be freighter, made planetfall on a Type M world known as Xenobiron, whereon she disembarked, unnoticed by the ship's crew. Lluvia spent a few years there, dodging the local authorities, honing her survival skills and supplementing her meager existence by becoming a master thief and pickpocket.

Always on the move, she chanced one fateful day upon a gang of youthful hooligans pounding unmercifully on a smaller, russet-haired child who was no match for the combined force of the much larger and older assailants. Ordinarily, her refined sense of self-preservation would have kicked in and she would have kept to the darker shadows to avoid any confrontation, but the pitiful cries of the out-numbered younger child plucked at a long dormant chord in her innermost core. When later pressed for details, she would say that it happened so fast that it felt like it never occurred at all.

However, Tristan's version of the events spoke of an intensely bright violet light suddenly coming out of nowhere, temporarily blinding both him and the bully boys beating up on him for sport. A few minutes later, when he finally found the nerve to uncover his bruise-swollen eye slits, the only person he saw standing in front of him was Lluvia. Neither hide nor hair of his tormenters was ever to be found again. The filth-encrusted girl stared at Tristan for what seemed to the frightened boy like an eternity, while a decision churned behind her dark blue eyes. Finally, she wordlessly reached down to offer her hand. The small battered boy looked at the pale, rag-covered hand and silently placed his own into it. With that small, hopeful gesture, he placed his life and his implicit trust into her youthful safekeeping.

From that point forward, the two children were inseparable. She taught him how to keep to the hidden and shadowy corners of their adopted world. He reciprocated with an unconditional, unquestioning companionship she'd been missing for so long. The enterprising moppets enjoined their talents into a symbiotic relationship that kept them satisfactorily fed and sheltered for quite a few years. Tristan's raggedly waif-ish looks proved to be an appealing lure for potential marks who would cough up any spare coinage they had just to coax a smile from the sad little beggar boy. In the meanwhile, Lluvia's ability to move like a wraith among the general population enabled her to discreetly acquire what little they needed to eat, to wear, etc. They migrated from town to town, working their trade with impunity, much to the chagrin of their victims and the local authorities, as the two little self-sufficient ragamuffins made their unique way through the squalid underbelly of Xenobiron's multi-class society.

Their exploits became legend among the petty criminals who, although envious of the two street urchins' successes at eluding the various constabularies, usually allowed the two a most respectfully wide swath. It was rumored that the girl had the ability to handily subdue anyone who tried to hassle either of them. Chicken hawks and other predators who wanted to capture the two in order to exploit them for unsavory entertainment purposes, soon found out firsthand what the girl could do. Very few survived to tell of their encounters with her, while many more were never seen or heard from again. The beaten survivors would speak in reverential tones of a powerful little fury unleashed when cornered. The two miniature felons were subsequently afforded many long respites of peace in which to ply their combined trade. That is, until the last batch of predators decided to come after them.

These particular chicken hawks were the most tenacious yet and, as hard as they tried, Tris and Lluvia had not been able to shake off their dogged pursuit. The deviants' voices were getting ever closer, their obscene taunts and curses warning of their imminent approach. On top of it all, Tris had lost his balance tumbling over a pile of strewn garbage and had earned himself a deep laceration on the back of his calf from a shard of some kind upon landing. There was no time to spare to attempt binding the wound with their rags and the blood trail was leading the sharp-eyed pursuers right to the two youngsters. Lluvia preferred to keep on running, but Tris' painful injury was beginning to slow them down considerably.

A vermilion dusk was beginning to steal the last of the daylight as the chase wound its way through the outskirts of the metropolis into a slightly more well-heeled enclave of walled homes. Tris' loss of blood finally depleted his youthful energy level, causing him to faint. This left the older girl no choice but to heft his unconscious body over her thin shoulders to resume their escape.

A mighty leap over one of the high walls landed both of them in a tumble into someone's carefully tended meditation garden. Unfortunately, a smear of bright blood on the top lip of the wall had revealed their escape route to their pursuers.

Lluvia dragged her friend's bleeding body into cover behind a large decorative granite boulder. The six chicken hawks crowed in triumph as they hoisted each other onto the top of the walled barricade. She crouched down into a four-point stance, her own coverage offered by a fairly large yew bush, awaiting the six perverts' arrival.

Her grimy hands flexed and clenched in anticipation of the fight as she watched the men land one by one into the garden. One was carrying a net, another chicken hawk a rope, and yet another had a pipe of some kind in his hand. A slight smile curved her mouth while she continued to quickly size up her adversaries. She'd faced down bigger and better than these fourth-rate bastards. But Tris was bleeding badly and inasmuch as she'd love to really give these guys a thorough and memorable thrashing, she only wanted to buy enough time to get him out of here and administer to his cut. Neither Lluvia nor any one of the chicken hawks gave a passing thought to the resident of the house or whether he might take exception with this intrusion into his normally serene refuge.

The guy with the rope made the first move, rushing at the girl while forcefully swinging the rope around, hoping to knock her down solely with its weight. Lluvia's arm darted out and she grabbed the heavy coils, wrapping them around her forearm and twisting her body in the direction of the swing. The force of his side swing left him off-balance enough so that the added momentum of her strong backward tug on the rope pulled him the rest of the way around and down. A quick chop to the back of his neck rendered him senseless. He had lost his grip on the rope and she flung it back over the wall before one of his compatriots could recover it. That would be one less weapon with which she had to contend. Next, the pipe-wielder bore down on the small girl with a downswing to her head. She executed a timely bob-and-weave and all that his pipe encountered was empty space. In one fluid motion, she ducked under his arm and caught his wrist with both hands to brutally twist it behind his back, neatly snapping his wrist bones and his grip on the pipe, which landed with a clatter onto the stone path. Her counterattack was completed with a vicious, bone-breaking kick to the back of his left knee. As he descended, the side of his head was abruptly introduced to another large piece of granite gracing the garden, knocking him out cold. Two down, four to go, and all of this action had eaten up only a couple of minutes' time.

The remaining assailants were momentarily stunned, astonished by the sheer ferocity coming off of this ostensibly weaker little female. With a collective cry, the four found their courage long enough to engage in a three-sided assault, forcing her to back up against the cement wall. Sure of their capture, the four prowled menacingly toward her, each of them picturing in their minds what they'd do to her once she was in their power. The attacker with the net threw it high enough so that she had no avenue by which to evade its cast and fight the four of them at the same time. A sudden gust of air passed between the combatants. Puzzled, they all looked up to see several large chunks of the net raining about them.

Lluvia's eyes widened at the sight of the older man poised behind her attackers, brandishing a brilliantly polished katana. Incensed by this interruption, the thugs shouted angrily and turned their attentions to the white-haired interloper. In the end, her would-be assailants never knew what hit them. Lluvia's vision, as sharp as it was, caught only some of the subsequent action. His movements registered only as a series of blade flashes and blurred afterimages. The katana effortlessly found its mark again and again until there were four severely bloody heaps scattered in front of the amazed girl.

Finally, the simultaneous release of accumulated tension and exhaustion overwhelmed her young body and mind. She felt the heavy blanket of unconsciousness embrace her when the mechanism that kept her sanity intact abruptly shut down. The last image registering on her memory of that night was a flickering gentleness reflected in the sensei's brown eyes as he looked down at her.

Bardock felt as if he was rousing from another one of his visions when Addy unexpectedly stopped his tale at that point. Raoul had approached Adarath to inquire about the absent twosome's whereabouts.

"Tris and Yu-vee have been out there for quite a while. Do you want me to go and check on them?" They all looked up as Tristan chose this exact moment to make his hasty entrance back through the doors, sans Lluvia.

Bardock remembered his assignment to shadow the female and he replied, "I'll do it."