Skullduggery pleasant

Octopine

credit for the drawing: @darq-draws on Pinterest

Violence and screamed weeping
Enjoy.

She tried to breathe as calmly as possible and, to no one's surprise, failed terribly.

Her left eye was twitching every three seconds and a lot of blood was running down her nose, eyes and ears and she really, really wanted to go home, pat her dog, sleep, shower, bath, do whatever came to mind once she was home. She just really didn't want to be here. Everything hurt, places that have never hurt this bad before now made up for all those years of not hurting.

It amused her to think that this could have been a normal day, had she not been this stubborn.

The thing 10 meters from her was screaming again, no, screeching again. Maybe it was laughing. It liked to do that a lot, so she figured then at least it would be a laughing, ugly monster instead of a screaming, ugly one. But Valkyrie didn't know, didn't really care. What she did know though, was that this weird breed of octopus and porcupine was going to kill her, tear her apart limp by limp if she didn't come up with something clever soon. Soon as in right about now, actually.

But in order to come up with something clever, she had to forget about the pain, which seemed like an impossible task right now, since there was an alarming amount of blood coming out of a hole somewhere in her stomach as well.

She had forgotten about that, she realized. There was blood pouring out of her in various places, it seemed.
Fantastic.

The odds were, as ever so often, not in her favor.

Her right ribcage felt like mush, therefore it probably was. She couldn't stand on her left leg, her right ear hurt like a buttcheek on a stick and her left was simply numb. Her eardrums had lost faith in life after this thing had screamed in her ears for twenty solid, terrible seconds. She couldn't even be mad at them for rapturing.

At least the screams were much more tolerable now that she could hear nothing but a faint buzz. 

The octopus-porcupine thing straightened, she decided to call it Octopine, it aligned its (what appeared to be a ) head with its spine, shifted its weight onto its rear tentacles (of which it had four) and, Valkyrie assumed, screamed. She could not hear its screams, she lacked working ears to hear them with, but she could tell by the way the ground shook.  She had to give it to the octopine, it wasn't very pleasant to look at, but it knew how to make noise.

She braced herself then. Well, braced is such a strong word in this particular context. Pathetic, really. There appeared to be no muscle left that would brace on command, but for the sake of the word lets call it brace.

Valkyrie felt the sudden, ridiculous urge to laugh.

The thing bolted towards her and she considered just letting it squish her. The best of people died ridiculous deaths, so why not her? She considered but decided Skulduggery would never let anybody forget how his partner, the girl who fought literal gods, was squished by an Octopine. So she dodged, groaning in pain as she felt the bone in her leg move a bit. Her hands were clutching her stomach, trying to slow the bleeding down. The thing flew past her, trying to regain its balance.

It charged again, swinging its tentacles at her and she went low, groaning again, dodging two rather clumsily and deflecting a third with the arm that wasn't stabilizing her bleeding stomach. She tried to put as little weight onto her broken leg as possible, but the Octopine was rather smart and seemed to pick up on that little fact. So it charged at her broken leg, wrapped around it and twisted.