Snippet #1489926

Lord Taylor told her not to sustain the shield, and truthfully she wasn't too fond of the idea herself, but still the basic concern that formed the foundation of Pandora's personality (along with the ridiculous hopefulness that kept her smiling) meant that she tried to protest. "But you're-" she cut herself off. Did she not dislike it when people tried to stop her from doing what she believed was her duty? She doubted very much that this man would appreciate being coddled because of his condition, and so she wasn't going to do that.

The Doctor was here now anyway, so that was something of a relief to her. Where exactly he had learned to fight like that was not something she wasted much time considering; she simply accepted that it was possible and let the last of the selective barrier dissipate- in time to admit three more assassins. One of them took one look at this and Icarus and charged, and Pan's first thought was, absurdly enough, that this was not the part of her city that she wanted the boy to remember the most.

The second thought, much more practical and swiftly on the heels of the first, was that she had to do something. She had an unconscious man and an innocent to protect, after all, and the other two in the room who could do anything about it were a bit preoccupied at the moment. The blond woman gripped her broken chair leg in one hand, knuckles turning bone-white. What was it Eos had said? Go for the groin, they expect to be hit in the head. Well, Pan was sure that was all well and good in most situations, but since the charging figure with the morning star was in fact a woman, it seemed a little misplaced here.

The woman swung while Pan spent far too long thinking, and the healer's eyes grew wide as saucers before she remembered herself and emitted a shrill noise of some variety that she was absolutely certain she had never heard before and ducked. Oh gods, ohs gods, what am I going to do? I'm not built for this, I can't fight, all I can do is- magic. She really could have smacked herself in the face right then, only it would have wasted more time and probably hurt besides, so instead she tried to think of what she could do. Combat spells were completely out- even if she had been capable of them, the idea of hurting someone else was one she found repugnant. Alteration and physical-world spells were bad too, mostly because she was horrible at them, so there was no possibility of something as advanced as a full-body bind, for instance.

Healing wasn't exactly the opposite of what she wanted to do, but it was close. Which left Metaphysics. But that was things like barriers, wards, seeing or inducing sleep states and particular kinds of dr- oh. Well, yes, that would probably do. Pan expanded her awareness to encompass the area, but she invaded nothing but the woman's mind, whispering soft, soothing tones into the center of her consciousness. Sleep, she urged gently, and it was so. The woman stopped mid-strike and simply fell unceremoniously to the floor.

---

Zade was bleeding freely from at least two or three different wounds, and her vision was getting blurry. Unfortunately, the assassins seemed to have little consideration for the fact that she was not at present terribly dangerous. She was in fact largely weaponless and also more tired than she could recall having been in a long time. It had been an annoyingly long day, even with the afternoon nap she’d taken. Her arm was still in stitches, for gods’ sakes!

She was backing up, looking around desperately for some way to resolve this situation, when she noticed the man- Amon- behind her opponents and swallowed. Part of her, as silly as it might be, believed that he was coming to help them. Of course, this part was swiftly quashed as the woman fell beneath his elegantly-efficient onslaught. Before Zade quite knew what was going on, he was holding his shortsword out to her, telling her that, no, she need not kill, but he wasn’t going to do everything for her. Or at least that was what she got from it at any rate.

She couldn’t well turn him down, not when she was smart enough to know that the Guildmaster was the one thing standing between her and a rather gruesome death. So it was with much reservation that she accepted the length of steel. She’d never used a shortsword specifically, but the mechanics were surely similar enough to the wider, single-edged scimitar-type blades she sometimes set on fire and juggled, weren’t they?

Either way, she was about to find out. A man with a wodao rushed her first, and she ducked out of the way, attempting unsuccessfully to get in past his guard and thrust; he simply stepped back, and the space between them was his range again. She half-expected the blade in her hands to flare with some kind of weird magic or something, but it was as far as she could tell a perfectly ordinary blade, but well-balanced. It was actually a good size and weight for someone like her, and she remembered that she was actually a couple inches taller than Amon, though it was so easy to forget given his presence.

She swung and parried, trying to get accustomed to the sword itself, and she knew that Amon moved to account for her mistakes. If she forgot about an opponent, he was there to block. If she ducked backwards, he was not in the way. She wondered at the fact that someone could control an area like that, and yet he had not killed all of them yet. Was it possible that killing his own people bothered him somehow? Or was he trying to do something else? Zade came to the realization that he might well be attempting to teach her something, for he only moved in to deal killing blows when her hesitation to do the same became obvious, and he only allowed in one opponent at a time. When all was said and done, she handed the blade back to him mutely, not exactly sure how to react to this knowledge. Something about the look on his face informed her that he knew she was aware, and he offered a courteous dip of his head as a form of acknowledgement.

She wasn’t really sure how to feel about that, either.