The Custodes

Chapter 37 - Weaklings

Zuro

Zuro was bored. This battle had been going on for far too long by his standards.

How many times had he killed these little runts by now? Too many, he guessed. At first he was confused; it should've been easy to kill a few humans, regardless of their stolen powers. Half of those he'd been up against fought similar to how Zuro would've when he was a toddler, and yet every time he attempted to land a killing blow something got in the way.

Eventually he figured out what that something was.  And then he figured out exactly how she was doing it.

The time girl. He should've realised it a long while ago. Admittedly, he hadn't been paying enough attention to her. As far as he was concerned she was useless in a fight, and it were the others who might end up providing a challenge to him. So far that hypothesis had proved disappointingly invalid. Eventually he started to pay more attention to the little flaws in his plans. The girl seemed to know exactly where, when and who he was going to attack, and the exact movements she had to pull off to prevent it. He didn't bother thinking about it for more than a second - he would just kill them the next time around - but then the same thing would happen, again and again, and his lack of bloodshed was causing him the tiniest bit of annoyance.

So once he figured out who was causing it, he started aiming for the girl herself. And the same thing would happen. Somehow - if even by the tiniest, most minuscule window - she remained unscathed each time. And that was when the annoyance turned to frustration. It took him another while to figure out a way around it. If he killed the girl, she somehow seemed able to go back in time and avoid it in the next iteration. How, he had no clue, but it was obvious that's what was happening. He couldn't lay a finger on the other runts either thanks to her, and those fucking healers meant that whittling them all down bit by bit was out of the question, so that left him with only one option.

If he could knock the time girl unconscious rather than kill her, that might provide him with the room to deal with the others. Of course, since he couldn't kill her it'd be tricky to deal with her afterwards, but he knew there'd be a way to solve that issue when he came to it. For now, he wanted blood.

However, before he could carry out his impromptu plan on taking out the time girl, something unexpected took place.

The boy - the little shit who'd caused him so many problems since he arrived on this pitiful planet - seemed to unlock some sort of power within himself, and for the very first time Zuro felt like some fun could be had with these weaklings.

And boy was he right.

Never before had an earthling felt like a threat to him. How could they? They were ants and Zuro was a God, but for those brief, brief moments of fighting Neo's shadow form - Zuro felt differently about it. It wasn't so much a matter of fear - the boy had still only done minimal damage to him - but his fighter's instincts were going crazy, telling him to be wary of what he was about to face. The rush that came with those instincts was euphoric; it was something Zuro had been searching for not just since he arrived at Earth, but for most of his life on Dathmos too.

And then, just like that, it was over.

The thrill of the fight lasted mere seconds, and then Neo took one of his friends' attacks head on and fled. Pitiful. Zuro felt a mixture of both irritation and wild disappointment, so much so that he forgot all about his plan to take out the time girl and merely went back to fighting the others.

There was one other that seemed to provide him with a decent fight. No rush came with it this time - no instincts telling him to watch out for his foe - but the man with the crystals managed to keep himself alive for more than a minute, which was more than he could say for the others.