We're All Ants To Them [Nevermore vs Mutts] Day 3

I swing twice and hit once, enough to make the thing bleed again, but not enough to kill it. It must shake the pain quickly, some kind of genetic fuck up, because before I can even blink it's jumping at me again.

There's suddenly a sickening crack and a flare firing off in my arm, a pain that propels me right back into childhood.

I know something in there must be broken, because my limb feels the same way it did when I was eleven and Aries was thirteen and he pushed me out of the big oak tree in the backyard. It feels the same way it did when I needed a cast forth whole months and instead of telling everyone it was because my brother pushing me out of a tree, I told them it was because I got in a fight with one of the Holden kids four blocks over.

“Motherfucker.”

Noel says something about a slaughter house and I internally kick myself, wincing at the idea of losing my place here. Because I guess I never really learnt how to shut the hell up.

I cradle my arm and mutter to myself, gritting my teeth against the sensations of my bone shifting, "Sorry I asked."

I feel the sting of falling two steps behind, losing my footing in some kind of social ladder and getting caught in the rungs. It took Ikaros dying for me to figure out that I need to start treading lighter - that these kids are trained killers and not the gullible jokes back at home.

And I'm not exactly thrilled about having alliance bonding time, but my arm hurts like a bitch, and the thought of being left behind makes my skin crawl.

The thought of a knife in my back does something worse.

So I grimace as Laurent shoves another javelin into the mutts and shift my weight back, showing Noel the fucked-up angle my arm is at, the spot where it's already rapidly bruising, "Does being on your 'good list' mean that one of you'll help me set this when these things are dead?"

But the mutt moves again, like it heard me, and I catch it in the corner of my eye, turning and clumsily swinging with my good arm before it can lash out again.