Garden of Enchantment 9: Cecilia GET (Patreon)

Unfortunately, his plan to incapacitate his target via drugs was thwarted by the target herself. It was just as Accord had written; she attracted attention to herself and being very intolerant for things she saw as wrong. Two days after he talked with Accord, Talrith found a discreet enough seller to supply him some medical-grade fentanyl aerosolizer. He would have accepted mail, but he didn’t exactly have an address in the city, and receiving narcotics in the mail back in the Palanquine might get him stink eyes, no matter what he intended to do with it. 

So he met up with the dealer, a pharmacy technician who needed some extra cash because of his debt, and got himself a handy little thing. 

Unfortunately, that’s when Sister Cecilia found them. 

Contrary to her title, she wore no habit of the Catholic nuns or those form concealing dresses. Instead of those, she wore a white one piece dress reaching down to her knees with a sash around her abdomen. But he kind of understood why they called her a “Sister”; she had a pair of white soft-looking wings. An angel would have been more apt, but hey, humans always had their reasons. Whether those reasons made sense was another matter entirely.

“Umm…” 

He hoped to the gods back in Runeterra that Cecilia wasn’t like Morgana or Kayle. Both of them were bad news when he was on the receiving end of their “righteous” fury. 

She also looked incredibly sad. 

“Must we engage ourselves in such destructive sins?” she asked them. 

Talrith pondered for a second while the technician ran for her life. He glanced at the back of the fleeing technician, having wanted to seduce her for a quick fuck, but his luck wasn’t great today. He looked back to Sister Cecilia and wondered if his bad luck would apply here too.

“It’s for my job, don’t worry,” he replied with a smile. 

She frowned.

He felt momentary shame at lying. “You just lied,” she spoke softly. Why would he be ashamed of lying? He’d been doing it for literally thousands of years. Was she a Thinker-Master? He couldn’t sense any mana from her. 

Deciding that he didn’t like where this was going, he lashed out. His right arm morphed into a blade and he thrust at her, going for a heavily wounding strike.

She looked surprised at him before she spun out of the way with a lithe grace of a hunting eagle. Then spears of light bloomed to life with a deep zap in each of her hands. 

“You dare strike against an angel of the heavens?!” she shouted indignantly. “Kneel and beg forgiveness, sinn-!”

‘So she was like Kayle,’ Talrith thought, not responding to her demand. Instead, he pulled back before his bladed arm could be attacked and struck out again with his faster left. What would have been a brawler’s lightning fast jab became an air rending stab as his left hand and arm twisted into a corkscrewed blade with a boost of magic to split the air around his arm, tunneling it through the corkscrewed blades which pushed him forward faster.

Cecilia’s eyes widened as she made to dodge again, pushing backward by flapping her wings forward, but he hadn’t boosted the speed of his stab with magic for no reason. Whatever ability or magic she had that gave her the power to fly with wings each only big as her torso, it wasn’t enough to dodge him. 

The tip of his blade-arm pierced … through a barrier that hadn’t been there before and stopped immediately. 

Cecilia glared at him before whirling in a circle before tossing both of the light spears at him. Talrith dodged out of the way easily, ignoring the way the sounds of mana bolt-like penetration of armor shizzled behind him. He pulled back again and slashed at her. 

The barrier broke in a single attack, but when he slashed again, another barrier was there. Despite this successive block of his attacks, Cecilia looked very winded less than fifteen seconds into the fight. 

Then Talrith got it. Her power drained her endurance to use, and the way she tried to dodge his first strike… Her barriers were automatic!

With a weakness to exploit, he wasted no time barraging her with stabs and slashes. She kept pulling backward, and soon, they were out in the open. Cars honked their horns and skidded to a stop while he continued to assault her with his transforming arms as weapons. 

Using magic would have won him the fight immediately, but he didn’t want to reveal any unnecessary information about himself to either Cecilia (in case she got away) or the public cape scene. 

He broke his third barrier. Then fourth.

Fifth. She began to sweat and gasp for breath.

Then he broke through the seventh and eighth and ninth.

And finally, on his tenth strike, his attack met no barrier, only naked flesh. She screamed when his left arm pierced through her right shoulder like a spike over a wooden board, a loud BLAP and squelch haunting the ears of the horrified onlookers. 

Some of them began to call out to her, even. 

No matter. 

He pulled his arm out and then …he sprayed her face with the very aerosolizer she almost prevented him from getting. She took one whiff of the stuff before keeling over. He caught her before her head hit the asphalt road. 

Talrith looked up as he heard the sirens approaching his location. 

Scoffing, he grabbed her, slung her over the shoulder, and left the scene through the alleyway, creating a portal back to Brockton Bay, now capable of using some of his more impressive magic since he had been able to see the city and feel its location in respect to Brockton Bay. 

Accord got what he wanted, and Talrith got a new woman to break in. 

He wondered if she was truly someone from a heaven or just playing to be so. 

Oh, the corruption was going to be fun~.