LIGHTNOVELONLINE Part 3 - Whistling Wings
The twilight angel’s antennae twitched. It raised its head to the sky. Norman knit his brow and followed its gaze. He heard the beat of wings that whistled.
Norman dove out of the way. Steely talons gouged the roof where he'd stood. Their wielder receded into the sky with a cooing howl, accentuated by a chorus of chirping.
Though the black sky revealed nothing, the whistle of its wings audibly shifted to and fro. It was circling.
Sparing a glance to monitor the angel, Norman dashed for the flashlight.
“It’s not just a ‘flashlight’. Not anymore,” he declared.
Norman dove, snatched it up mid-roll, removed the safety and dialed up the settings. Its inductor to life with an ominous whine.
*fweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ...*
"Ladies and gents, it's time I officially introduced the SMITELIGHT!" he declared.
*FFFOOOOOOOMM!*
Raised to the sky, Norman’s smitelight flooded the heavens with lurid radiance. Clouds, formerly featureless amid the dark, were rendered in stark detail. There it was, diving towards him: a brown, freckled bird the size of a small aircraft, engulfed in a massive tangle of branches. The light brought its smooth descent to shambles. He focused the beam on it and vaulted over an A.C. vent, taking cover. The roof shook as the bird came crashing down atop it.
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INQU!SIT_R: WHAT IS THAT THING?!?
“Whistling-wing,-matriarch,” Norman rapidly explained: “Night-shifted-wood-dove. New-variant.”
Norman was already running. The injured bird throbbed an intricate coo. Clicking claws. Something caught up with him. It pounced from the edge of his vision.
Almost without thinking, he struck it out of the air. Sparks exploded from the collision of his electrified smitelight. The twitching form of a featherless fledgling whistling wing sprawled unconscious on the floor. Ordinarily, the sight would evoke sympathy, but at the size of a coyote? With the structure of a velociraptor and claws the size of thumbs on its wingtips? This was no innocent party.
He didn’t have time to think about that anyway.
The fledglings were all around him, pouring from the tangle of sticks enveloping the giant bird: a mobile nest. Too swift to outrun, they swarmed and converged to the throbbing coos from the matriarch’s commands. The fall had broken its wing, but not its voice. Eyes sealed shut, the fledglings were blind, but the matriarch’s voice was their guiding light.
Norman’s thoughts warred with his will: ~There are too many. ̴I̸ ̵c̴a̷n̷ ̶d̸o̷ ̸t̸h̶i̴s̶.̶ No̴ ̶o̶p̴e̵n̵i̶n̷gs̴.̶ I’ll make one. Y̸o̴u̴ ̶c̸a̷n̶’̵t̷.̸ I WILL!~
Something snapped, broke and opened. His world grew faster and slower simultaneously, but he somehow knew nothing really changed. Nothing without, but within. His peripheral vision parted like a veil as his eyes drank intricate details about a dozen fledglings without having to focus on a single one. Each sound splashed and bent around his surroundings before reaching his ear. He heard shapes, tasted scents, felt the folds of his outfit warping with every ebb and flow of air, thick like water.
That thought … it brought him back without taking him anywhere. It brought him back to words he sought to embody. In an enigmatic city besieged by The Night Shift, he believed he’d succeeded, but he was wrong. Oh, so very wrong.
“Be like water, making its way through the cracks. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
A fledgling’s clawed wingtip was heading for his neck. Seven millimetres away, it would never get closer. Norman had pivoted, guiding its body away with a palm the way one would brush a stray lock out of their face. He stepped over a fledgling snapping at his ankle with the casual air of climbing a stair. His focus was elsewhere, narrowing upon a path where there once was none. A flick of the switch.
*FFAASSH!*
The smitelight’s quick burst stunned all in his path like the blast of a shotgun. He advanced. It was neither a walk nor a run. It was whatever he needed it to be. Norman waded through the swarming fledglings like a crowded street. Claws and beaks skimmed his clothes and skin. They never penetrated. Of course, a pedestrian crowd didn’t actively go out of its way to bite and slash. When contact was inevitable, he introduced them to his fists, feet, knees, elbows, shoulders, any miscellaneous part of his body that proved appropriate. When that wasn’t enough, he reintroduced them to each other. Tender touches tweaked their momentum into little meetings, noisy and chaotic as any family reunion ought to be. Then there were the lucky birdies who got a lightshow to the face. He never did more than he had to with tiny moves that had no names. They weren’t the relatively rigid, martial arts techniques he had mastered through tens of thousands of repetitions. Training was the riverbed. This was the water. It just … made sense in the moment, and only in the moment.
Through it all, the twilight angel watched inscrutably from the sidelines.
For a time, the chat was speechless.
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JARON-DA-MON: …
ARN74: 😧
LIKKLE-BOY: …
INQU!SIT_R: ;AKJFYFOJI???
RAIDER-COMMANDER: Haa! Look at that! He can do it too!
INQU!SIT_R: DO WHAT?????? TELL ME YO SECRETS!!
PARKOUR-PARKER: what … what martial art is this?
RAIDER-COMMANDER: Yes.
ARN74: answer the question, jerk
WONNA_ONE23: bullet time tings
Norman had slipped through the cracks. The swarm was behind him. He didn’t even turn to look at them. He knew where each one was. His smitelight was already aimed backwards, lining up the shot to blanket blast them all.
A warning tickled in his mind.
*fweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee …*
~No flash. Not enough juice.~
That was enough to snap him out of whatever altered state of consciousness he achieved.
Norman swapped the smitelight back to its normal settings as the matriarch bayed a baleful coo. The fledglings’ heads snapped towards him in unison. At low charge, he wouldn’t be able to stun all of them, but maybe-
The twilight angel lunged into the whistling wing and latched on, its tentacles constricting like an anaconda. The giant avian redirected its fledglings to attack the angel. He didn't stick around to find out what happened next, but judging from the sound of snapping branches and possibly bones, things were not going well for the whistling wing.
Norman leapt off the side of the building. He slowed his descent with the railings of a fire escape on every storey: fall, grab, release, fall, grab, release, fall. Skipping the last two storeys, he dropped into a roll. His smitelight torched the surrounding alley, seeking to rout any unseen nyctals. There were none.
He rapidly plucked out the smitelight’s battery. Overtaxed, the old one glowed red-hot. If not for the W.A.S.A.-grade insulation gloves capable of surviving atmospheric reentry, that little battery would have a very different relationship with his fingers. He slipped it into a cooling cartridge on the flank of his backpack and replaced it. The practiced process took one second flat.
“Proper disposal is very important. Don’t want to start a fire,” Norman whispered to the chat.
It was safe to say they weren’t interested in such details at the moment.
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A1GHT_DEN: THAT WAS AWESOME!!
RAIDER-COMMANDER: Well done.
MUNSTER_VERSER: literally crying with joy rn ‘cause this is irl.
UNREPENTANT-MEMER: WHY NORMAN GET TO LIVE LIKE DIS?? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME!! NOT HIM!!
BAJANETTE11: WONNA LEFF DE ANGEL!
ENTO_MOLLY: Yes! Go back for the angel!
CRINGY-BINGER: i don’t know how i found this channel, but i ain’t never goin’ back!
Norman took off, lighting a path through the back alleys to put as much distance between himself and the monsters as possible. Sure, he was curious as to who would win in the battle of nyctals. Why had the twilight angel stepped in? Maybe it was aware that he had saved it. Maybe it was returning the favour. Maybe it was a territorial beast whose inhuman thought process could turn it against him at a moment’s notice. He didn’t have the leisurely luxury to find out. The commotion would have roused every opportunistic predator within earshot.
This was going to be one of those nights.