Subtlest Game: Book One - March of the Pawns

Chapter One: The Archangel Imperium

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Ceris ducked as a blow flashed past her head, then teleported backwards just before a second one obliterated the space where her torso had been a nanosecond before.
She cursed, panting, staying in a wide, defensive stance with her arms raised.

Her opponent gave a soft little giggle.
'Had enough already?'
She giggled again.
'Am I stronger? Or are you weaker? So hard to tell...'
Blood roared in Ceris's ears, and she lunged forwards, dancing around her opponent in an elaborate pattern of blows and teleports.
None made contact, however, as her enemy weaved and flexed like a snake, even turning to a wave of black liquid through which Ceris's fist passed harmlessly.

Then Ceris made her mistake. She stepped back into a defensive stance again, but this time, her feet weren't far enough apart, their width smaller than that of her shoulders. Her opponent saw the opportunity and threw a low punch at Ceris's gut. Ceris blocked, but her poor stance meant that the force sent her stumbling back. She straightened up in time for her opponent to land on her shoulders, throwing herself back, landing Ceris lying out on the floor as her opponent's legs locked around her neck in a triangle choke, one arm pulled through the cage of her legs and forced across her body. Ceris cursed, trying to extricate herself as the pressure on her arteries rapidly cut off her blood supply.

Arabella tilted her head in an almost coquettish manner.
'Submit?'
Ceris's breath came in short rasps, her face beginning to flush, partly from embarrassment, partly from lack of oxygen.
'Not in the Nether's torched wasteland.' she managed to splutter out.
Arabella, pirate vampire turned Siren, and Ceris's girlfriend as of one week ago, gazed at Ceris with eyes that were pools of blackness, in which the faintest hues of colour whirled and span and rippled in towards the glowing white slits of her pupils in a slow motion hurricane.
'Ceris...don't make me put you to sleep...'
Her legs tightened threateningly, thighs pressing against Ceris's arteries. Arabella tilted her head again, then giggled.
'Although if I must finish this the hard way...I suppose I wouldn't hate the task...of squeezing your little neck till you break...'
Ceris's six dragon wings flapped uselessly on her back. Her scaly black tail, with a purple light at the tip, lashed at Arabella's head, but a pillar of dark blood erupted from between Arabella's shoulder blades, forming bone, then muscle, then skin, becoming a third arm which grasped the tail and pinned it to the floor.

A smile balanced between cruelty and amusement stretched Arabella's lips a couple of centimetres.
'Well?' Her legs slowly crushed around Ceris's body, and the former queen began to feel light-headed.
'Very well...I submit.'
Yet again. Added Ceris in her head. This was her eleventh duel in the six and a half days since Arabella had agreed to help Ceris reclaim her kingdom, and the result showed little improvement from the previous matches. Each time Arabella had defeated her with almost offensively casual moves: a punch here, a kick there, an arm slipped easily around her neck to choke her out.
It was to be expected, Ceris supposed. Following a dark ritual to summon the power of her ancestors, Arabella had become a Siren, one of the hypnotic, shapeshifting beings that had once ruled the End in the ancient days of savagery and primal power.
As far as Ceris could tell, Siren powers mostly revolved around hypnosis, manipulation and trickery, but that didn't mean Arabella couldn't throw a good punch. Quite the opposite in fact, as Ceris's new set of bruises could testify, given that Arabella's metamorphosis abilities meant she could simply order her muscles to be stronger. That, combined with an unusual form of fighting that seemed more like dancing than anything, made her a formidable opponent.

Arabella released Ceris from the triangle choke, her third arm dissolving back into her body as she got up. Her black wings rustled slightly, colour spilling across the iridescent feathers as she looked down at Ceris.
'Remind me why you keep insisting to spar me? Not that I mind, but you're not getting anywhere.'
Ceris scowled, flicking her tail irritably as she rose.
'You're the first being I've met who's significantly stronger than me for nearly a hundred years. I need the experience.'
She walked off the training mat Arabella had set up in the room that doubled as her bedroom and study, picking up a longsword that she had left on the floor while they sparred.
It was pretty, in the deadly way of well-crafted weapons. One and a half metres of black metal, with a silver cross guard composed of several slim metal rods, forming a cage around her hand. The slightest splits in the blade revealed the segments it split into to become a deadly whip.
Technically, it was her sword, but she had difficulty thinking of it that way. The sword had belonged to Aiko, Arabella's first girlfriend, who had died at Arabella's hands. Arabella didn't like to talk about it, but she had given Ceris the sword for the battle against Pontus, the traitorous general of the Orchid fleet.