Page #8

Outside the jewelers iron shop the air was still. The light of the moon shone from high above Kota as he exited, he noticed the quiet the uneasy calm that had settled into the night. Kota looked in all directions as the solid thud and clang of the iron doors fell behind him. The guards were not at their post all twelve of the brawlers and swordsmen were nowhere in sight. Kota inhaled deeply to detect the smell of midnight mist wafting from the many oases surrounding mirage city but there was another scent infused with evil and violence the smell of blood wafted through the streets. Kota began to turn when he heard a voice smoother than spider’s silk behind him. “Where are you going young one?”  There behind Kota stood a shifter. <Shifters or Shapeshifters were notorious assassins they never looked entirely human though they usually favored their animal forms over their humanoid appearance, often because they could never maintain this shape for too long.>

The shifter was a very attractive young woman her body was covered in the thinnest thread Kota had ever seen. Her hair was blacker than the night beyond the stars and her eyes stood out from her heart shaped face a very cerulean blue. Her skin was pale as sand and her clothing were more or less under garments. The only way Kota knew for a fact she was a shifter was the not so subtle hint of the six arms she had folded across her front.

“Me?  Miss…I’m going home but a woman of your beauty should not be out in this cold with so little on. Would you care to come home with me?”  Kota teased as he prepared his power gauntlet. He did not turn it on but merely hand his hand on the trigger inside the mechanism. 

The Shifter woman laughed and clutched her sides. “No thank you I don’t play with my food.” As she finished speaking she threw her hands up and tossed a sticky net over Kota, knocking him down and pinning his power gauntlet to the ground. Kota struggled for a moment then reached into his cloak and removed a hatchet his only other weapon. With a great amount of effort he swung the hatchet and began to free himself from the webbing pinning his gauntlet to the ground. After only one swing he pulled the trigger inside and the gears of the gauntlet began to spin tearing through the rest of the shifters net.

With a venomous hiss the shifter began to change her shape her pale skin turned black, her hair changed to a milky white; her arms erupted into powerful claws and her hearts shape faced twisted into a maw of gnashing pincers. “I wonder how your blood will taste.”