ʟᴏꜱᴛ ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ || 𝟙

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 4

Her head jerked upwards as she heard the sound of what could only be some sort of incendiary device being planted at the base of the door.

The corner of her lip turned up slightly in a smile as she waited for the explosion, maintaining her seated position on the high-backed swivel chair. She estimated approximately five minutes before she had to actually get up and engage in any sort of fight. Besides, the corner of the room she was in provided excellent acoustics, every tiny twinge or footfall reverberating around her.

He must have been holding back on whatever he was using because all she saw was a thin wisp of smoke before the door frames came crashing down, as he swung into the room, landing squarely on the Vita-Ray Chamber.

"Whoever you are, I need E.D.I.T.H. Now." his white eye pieces narrowed as he crouched, X-ray scanners looking for the intruder.

"For someone who's supposed to have enhanced senses, you really don't have great eye-sight do you?"

She planted her feet and pushed, the chair rolling to the left as a web shooter was slung at the general direction of her head.

"Come on, I really don't want to hurt you and I kind of got a secret identity crisis going on." he pleaded and hearing the desperation in his voice she could picture the high school teenager's face, not that far from her own age.

This was starting to bore her. It was time to actually get what she came here for.

"Even if you wanted to, you couldn't."

Before he could register where the voice had come from, she had leapt from her chair with the precision and strength of a coiled snake, leg already cocked and ready to deliver a solid kick to the chest, before landing precariously on a railing.

He didn't even see it coming.

Already prepared for his next move, she programmed her bracelet, setting them on to low. She just wanted him stunned, not electrocuted to death.

Shooting a volley of electric bursts in the direction of his fall, she waited for the sound of a body hitting the ground, hopefully followed up closely by the melody of flailing limbs.

Unfortunately, her hubris was her downfall.

She was tugged backwards, back hitting the railing which she felt snap underneath her body weight and sheer force, before crashing into an adjacent wall, the breath knocked out of her.

Okay, maybe it was time to take him a little bit more seriously.

Tumbling to the floor, she landed on all-fours,  knees and palms absorbing most of the impact, also giving her the opportunity to reach for the throwing knives at her ankles. The knives were her arrows. Her arms, the bows. Launching them from both sides of the body, she heard a distant laugh.

Given the geometry of the room, he was right to think that she was stupid. The walls were curved and given her position, any normal knife would have just bounced off the surface.