König and His Darling

Chapter Twelve

We descend the steps quietly, the throbbing in my leg becoming more apparent as time passes by. The arms of Time were not going to cut me any slack tonight, the night seems to drag even longer than usual. I grit my teeth and try to focus on the task ahead as I watch König move without a sound, not even a disturbance to the air around him. Impressive seemed to not be a strong enough word to describe it.

As he reaches the door, König turns around and makes eye contact with me, his eyes noticeably soften as he does a quick glance down my body, only now becoming aware of the blood dripping down my ankle and filling my shoe. His eyes shoot back up to meet mine and I send him a silent 'no time, we have to move' message. It's as if our minds have meshed and he could hear my thoughts because he gave a quick nod and moved out into the silent, damp night.

I quickly follow as we both set into a quiet trot while crouching down. Eventually we come upon an underwater waterway, this must be the one that Ghost had mentioned to us earlier to take, quietly remembering all of the back and forth banter between Ghost and Soap you had to suffer through throughout the night. I look up at König and with a forced smile I leap into the water.

The water was so cold it shocked my senses when I hit it, every nerve becoming painfully aware just how exhausted I truly was, I could hear König behind me, making just the slightest of noise as he moved through the water behind me, his height allowing him to walk through all of it.

We froze as we heard a Shadow's radio pipe up further down the waterway. I quickly glance at König before I dip under the water, my knife I earlier relieved a dead soldier from in my teeth. I swim up to the Shadow and quickly slice the back of his knees before shooting from the water, breaking the surface with force, sending water spraying everywhere around us as I reach up and slice the throat of the Shadow within seconds as he barely could begin his scream from the painful slice to his knee.

I look over as I hear a crack and see König holding the head of another Shadow at an unnatural angle in comparison to his limp body, his neck clearly broken as König simply drops him into the water, glances at me, and turns to continue further up. We reach as far as the cover of the water can take us and we pull ourselves from it, the church now clearly in sight.

We begin our same pace as before but now I have a noticeable limp and paleness to my skin as the events and blood loss of the night have begun to creep up my spine to my consciousness. Contemplating possibly stopping to take a second to regain even a semblance of strength, my thoughts are interrupted by gunfire and a lot of it.

"Soap, get to the church entrance, I will meet you there" Ghost yells over the Radio.

I look up at König who meets my look as we quickly turn and pick up our pace, the adrenaline of the ensuing firefight ahead of us dampening out any fatigue I had temporarily. We round the corner to see Ghost and Soap running towards a truck, shooting behind them as Shadows swarmed from every side. König and I took up the firefight, giving them much needed cover as they both jumped in the truck.

The truck began to barrel towards us with no intention of slowing down,

"Better grab on guys!" Soap yells over the radio at us.

Before I can react I can feel my entire body jerk into the air, I look up quickly to see König has picked me up, before I can protest he throws me over his shoulder and jumps forward, grabbing the edge of the truck as it flew by, throwing himself and me over the edge into the bed of it effortlessly. The jerk of hitting the bed of the moving truck mixed with Ghost's clear lack of driving ability threw us down into the side of the truck hard.

I just lay down, unable to move anymore, König pulls my limp body close to his as he reaches over me with his weapon, still returning fire at the last few men in sight. I look up at his covered face, seeing the hardness in his eyes as he is focused on the mission ahead. His eyes are the last thing I see as I finally drift into unconsciousness.