Lady Belix, Knight Dragoon VS werebeast

The dust had not settled in three days, and Lady Belix, Knight Dragoon, had learned long ago that it never would.

She stood at the lip of a collapsed overpass, hood drawn, red optics burning two holes through the gloom. Below, in the cratered plaza, the thing that had drawn her here paced on four legs and then two, cycling between shapes as though unable to decide which version of its hunger fit best. Green fur, black claws, a mane like burnt wire. The werebeast. It had come for the same thing she had — the beacon, buried under the rubble at the plaza's center, still ticking out its slow pulse of light. Somebody's lost signal. Somebody's last words. They had both heard it, and only one of them would walk away from the answer.

"Same grave," Belix murmured into her mask. "Different mourners."

The werebeast heard her. Its head snapped up, jaws parting on a snarl that rolled across the ruins like a collapsing wall. Then it charged.

She had expected that. She had, in fact, counted on it. The rifle came up — long, scoped, older than most of the cities she'd buried — and she put a round into the ground six feet ahead of its front paws. The crater erupted, spraying concrete and rebar into the beast's face. It veered, claws gouging trenches in the asphalt, and came at her from the flank instead.

Belix was already moving. Down the rebar ladder, boots ringing on rusted metal, three rungs at a time. A second shot took the werebeast across the shoulder — a graze, nothing more; the thing's hide was like layered plate. It roared, spun, and closed the distance in a single bound.

First contact. Claws raked the air where her chest had been; she dropped, rolled, came up with the rifle reversed and drove the stock into its knee. The beast didn't buckle. It grabbed the barrel instead, wrenched, and the rifle skidded away across the rubble in a spray of sparks.

"No," Belix said, almost calmly, and drew the sidearm she never mentioned. Three rounds point-blank into its throat. The werebeast staggered back, hacking, black blood steaming where it hit the cold ground.

For a moment they simply looked at each other — knight and wolf, both breathing hard, both bleeding, both standing over the same buried signal. A pause. The beacon pulsed once between them, patient as a heartbeat.

Then the werebeast did something Belix had not seen before. Its body shimmered, fur rippling backward along its spine, and for a heartbeat it seemed to un-happen — to run in reverse, wounds closing, the three bullets backing out of its throat and falling spent to the floor. Belix's grip tightened. She had seen a lot of impossible things in the wastes. She had not seen time itself spit something back out.

But the werebeast did not stop at healing. It rode the reversal like a slingshot — let the backward tide carry it, then snapped forward, using the recoil of its own un-wounding to hurl itself across the plaza faster than any charge it had made before. It breached the gap between them in the space of a blink and slammed into her, claws closing on her armored forearm, jaws snapping for the joint where mask met collar.

Belix went down under the weight of it. The sidearm spun away. Her shoulder screamed. The beast's breath was hot and rank against her throat, and its eyes — glowing, yes, but not empty. There was something in them she recognized. Grief, maybe. Or thanks.

"Not yet," she said.

Her free hand found the beacon under the rubble, fingers closing around the cold casing. She hauled it up and drove it into the werebeast's open mouth.

The pulse went off.

Light, white and total, blew the beast off her and carved a crater in the dust where it landed. It howled — the first sound it had made that wasn't rage — and staggered upright, fur smoking, and for one instant it looked almost human in its pain, one paw raised as if to ask a question.

Belix did not waste the opening. She crawled to the rifle, dragged it into her broken shoulder, and sighted down the scope. The werebeast was already lunging. She had one round. She had always had one round. That was the whole story of her life — one round, one chance, one more morning she hadn't earned.

"Ride this," she whispered, and fired.

The shot took the beast between the eyes. It stopped mid-stride, stood a moment like a statue of itself, and then folded down into the dust — shrinking, fur receding, the green draining out of it as its body remembered what it used to be. By the time the light died, there was only a shape in the rubble, still, and small, and quiet.

Belix lay where she was for a long time. The beacon pulsed once more in her hand and then went dark. Another signal answered. Another grave closed.

She did not feel like a victor. She rarely did. She pushed herself up, gathered the rifle, and walked toward the shape in the rubble to see what it had been — because someone had to, and it was always her.

"Lucky again," she said to no one. "What a joke."