Sweet Death: Into The Black P9

Chapter 9: Pitch Black

For a single second, perhaps less, Marceline thought that everything would turn out okay.
As much as she hated the man lying below her, clutching the wound from her opening strike, she had to admit that she would be dead without him. If he hadn't gotten so arrogant as to change his absurdly well-thought-out plans at the last minute and get a strike in with his own hands, she would be nothing more than a pile of bloody, sun-bleached ash ready to be dispersed into the wind with little fanfare.
But she was now amped up on two consecutive exposures to pure human blood: first from the source, she shuddered to think, and then through maximum color extraction from the splashes on her clothes and body. For a vampire, that was a brief window into godhood -- hopped-up abilities, plus the added benefit of being able to regenerate from usually lethal traumas. She was feeling stronger, faster, and more perceptive than she remembered feeling throughout her centuries of life, and she was more than ready to put those sensations to good use pummeling Peppermint Butler's entire being into dust on the cobblestones.
When the second passed, her thoughts caught up to her, and she realized that she might have cast her judgements too early.
Peppermint Butler's arm flashed up with almost imperceptible speed, carrying with it the kukri knife that had served his goals for so long. The curved blade hooked into Marceline's thigh and sliced lengthwise down, cleaving muscles and tendons apart as it went. Startled, but not yet absorbing the intensity of the pain, she flipped upward through the air and yanked the knife out before its owner could reclaim it.
The damage of the strike fully manifested as soon as she came to a rest, in the form of an unending wave of agony traveling up from her thigh to her core. However horrible the pain might be, she reminded herself that she had barely more than an hour ago been scorched to the bones under a week of direct sunlight, and minutes ago fallen victim to a stab wound that had cut into her heart -- blade strikes could cause her pain, but they paled in comparison to what she'd been forced through already.
Marceline brought up the kukri knife and held it threateningly out at Peppermint Butler, who had managed to stagger to his feet. "And now I have the strength advantage and your only weapon. For someone who's been planning this for centuries, you really didn't think things through, did-?"
Just as she was pronouncing the last word in her sentence, Peppermint Butler closed the distance between them with almost as much speed as she was currently capable of. She felt her teeth slide back as his shoe collided with her lower jaw, and she had to pause for a split second to hack out a splatter of blood that had started flowing down her throat. Unfortunately, that split second was more than enough time for Peppermint Butler to prize the kukri out of her momentarily weakened hands, springboard off of her shoulders, and make another devastating cut across an exposed portion of her back.
When he landed, he wasted no time taunting or making boastful chatter. Instead, he charged straight for her again, visibly intent on burying the blade up to its hilt in her chest again. She was able to intercept the move this time by catching the blade between her palms, but rather than open Peppermint Butler up to counterattack, it gave him the momentum to flip up, rip the blade out of her grip, and slash it over her right eye.
Almost immediately, she found herself at a disadvantage. With her eye damaged and dripping blood, she could only keep track of where the nimble assailant was with her other senses, and he seemed competent at avoiding detection by those. The damage to her leg and back was already healing with the leftover energy of her blood consumption, which, while helpful, was draining the boosts to her strength and stamina slowly but surely. Plus, since her eye was more complex than anything on the surface of her body, it would take much longer to regenerate.
She was forced to move around the dungeon as quickly as she could, navigating between the shadows with her remaining sight and watching out for any glints of a swinging blade. The vile butler would be in his element now, stalking through the shadows with gleeful abandon and preparing to execute her if she made one false step. She couldn't see Bubblegum anywhere, either -- had she fled like any sane person, confident in the victory of the one who clearly was meant to have the upper hand?
The movement of the air behind her registered on her skin, giving her the chance to strike out with a balled fist and connect with the deceptively sturdy surface of Peppermint Butler's body. She heard his wail of pain behind her, and she immediately wheeled around to capitalize on her opponent's vulnerability. However, rather than scuttle back in pain and fright, Peppermint Butler lunged forward again and shoved the blade close to her throat. She barely managed to stop its path by pinning it between her chin and her clavicle, giving her an up-close view of her opponent's face while she struggled back into a good position.
Peppermint Butler's eyes were filled with burning rage, but there was nothing animalistic or mindlessly driven in them. The glimmer of intelligence still flickered through, obscured, but vibrant. It was clear to her that every move he was making, every lunge and flipping blow, was carefully thought out and executed several steps ahead of time. She had expected to win a confrontation like this by simply overpowering him, but it was rapidly becoming clear that that simplistic, predictable strategy would be impossible to execute.
Trouble was, she had no idea what to replace it with.
Marceline managed to slip one of her hands up to her throat and force the blade away, though it took some skin off of her chin with it. Peppermint Butler jabbed the kukri forward again with ceaseless precision, but rather than try to intercept it again, Marceline dodged away and prepared to flee to a more open, tactically advantageous area. She barely floated two inches before Peppermint Butler rushed up again, stabbing relentlessly, and she was forced to put all of her energy into avoiding the lightning-quick strikes.
Wearing me out, she realized. Sucking off my energy so he can go in for the kill.
She rushed back the way she came, avoiding the slices that were forming into little more than ripples in the air, and found herself getting struck in the head by the butler's startlingly forceful fist. Winded, she collapsed stomach-first onto the unforgivingly hard dungeon floor, and not a second passed from this before Peppermint Butler was at her again, stabbing downward and almost driving the blade's tip into the floor with every miss. She rolled to avoid them, thankful that the change of angles was slightly slowing his attack speed for the moment, but she had no idea how much longer she could keep up the evasion.
That was when Marceline caught sight of Bubblegum standing by the doors to the compound, lifting a hefty chunk of stone high next to one of the thick glass viewports.

***

Swirling black powder rushed into the room instants after the glass shattered, and Peppermint Butler begrudgingly congratulated the Princess as he fought to keep up his offense.
If he had to guess about events he had not witnessed as they transpired, then she'd managed to pry away one of the loose stones from the dungeon floor, ascertained the structural focal points of an outwardly smooth and uniform piece of glass, and delivered a calculatedly powerful strike that had shattered the reinforced material, allowing the still-churning incendiary powder into the chamber. He had to admit, it was a decent strategy, though he was unsure whether the Princess knew how decent. The powder operated by homing in on heat signatures, and the accursed vampire had no heat signature to speak of, meaning that she would likely be safe other than minor flash burns.
What she couldn't know was that he'd synthesized the heat-seeking synthetic structure to not recognize his own bodily heat as a targetable signature, in case there was a lab accident or storage leak.
He was able to see the Princess stumble back as the black cloud roared in, gripping her lightly singed face and scurrying back to a safer distance. The small bottleneck of the window frame ensured that not enough of the substance would leak in to cause the instantly lethal effects endured by Task Force Sweet Death, so her part in the battle was over; she would cause a distraction to turn the tables in Marceline's favor, then retreat to the sidelines in hopes of escaping with the vampire before dawn.
Marceline would NOT be escaping what she so richly deserved.
Although he was mostly safe from the effects of the burning powder, it was starting to fog up his vision and blind him. He swore and rolled back a relatively safe distance from Marceline, giving himself enough of a buffer zone to attempt to wipe his eyes clear. As his luck would have it, this only made it worse, and now his eyes were beginning to burn irritatedly.
He couldn't stand the idea of having Marceline escape or get the drop on him while he was rubbing his own weapons technology out of his eyes, so he struggled through the rising pain and found himself staring through a swirling blur of pure blackness. Every which way he looked, he could see nothing but this pitch darkness. It reminded him, he noted with no sense of irony, of wearing his hood for the first time before getting used to the restricted vision field.
The air shifted behind him, beelining toward the dungeon exits. He knew what that sensation meant.
He only had one shot.
He turned...
... Gripped the kukri knife by the blade with two fingers...
... And threw, releasing it on the most precise path he could manage with his adrenaline pumping.
He heard a moist k-thunk, followed by a half-gasped scream and the familiar sound of a body hitting the ground.
Grinning a grin that stretched almost entirely across his face, Peppermint Butler moved ahead, forcing himself through the cloud. With less active energy to home in on, the particles of powder were starting to slow down and drift to the floor, allowing him to more easily cross the surprisingly long distance between his kukri's origin and its point of impact.
His eyes cleared.
Marceline was on the ground, facing away from him with her legs splayed out behind her, audibly sobbing and shaking. She was trying to whisper something, but he was starting to lose focus, and he couldn't make it out.
His smile widened, and he took one more step forward, looking for his blade so he could finish the job. It must have caught her somewhere vital and cleanly sliced through to fall somewhere, but he hadn't heard it clatter to the ground. On the off chance that this was some kind of ruse, he hadn't hit, and Marceline had acquired the knife, then he would...
...
...
...
And then he saw it.
It was buried in a body.
Its sleek black hilt was sticking straight up out of the fabric of a pink dress, which was slowly turning red around the point of the damage.
His heart skipped a beat, then two more.
Princess Bubblegum stared up at the ceiling, her eyes flicking back and forth with increasing urgency as the vital fluids poured out of her. Unlike the wound he'd been confident had killed Marceline, this was far from a clean forward stab. Beside the blade's final resting point was a long, jagged cut that stretched from her side to her navel, and it was through this gaping wound that his Princess's life was vanishing.
Marceline was kneeling over her, crying and panicking, trying to do whatever she could, but Peppermint Butler payed her no mind. His own mind was breaking with every second that passed.
He'd stabbed the Princess.
He'd stabbed Princess Bubblegum.
The one this project was intended to save.
The one he had served for his entire life.
He'd stabbed her, and now she was dying because he'd stabbed her and she was dying because he'd stabbed her and she wasdyinghestabbedherdyingshewasstabbedherhestabbedherhemurderedhermurderedhekilledherhewasamurdererhewas-
She stopped moving.
A faint cry escaped Peppermint Butler's otherwise paralyzed throat, and he keeled forward onto his knees.
Princess Bubblegum.
Dead by his hand.
He couldn't do anything.
Marceline stopped quivering, shut the princess's eyes, bent down to kiss her on the lips one final time, and turned back to face him. He numbly observed, without really taking much in, that she didn't look sad at all.
He would call her expression one of tranquil fury.
"We were leaving," she spoke softly. "I was tired of fighting you. We were just trying to get out with our lives."
And without further ado, as if his mind could take no further stress, Marceline vanished into thin air. He couldn't tell, but it didn't look like she had simply used a supernatural cloaking ability.
It looked like she was moving too quickly to focus on.
Suddenly, before he could even come close to recovering, a massive weight struck him across the back of his head with the force and pressure of an ocean. The air around him blurred for a moment as he was knocked back into a wall, and his head partially cracked open.
"What was that you said earlier?" The infernal vampire's voice rang out from nowhere and everywhere at once. "About being able to walk away at any point and not taking the chance?"
This time, there wasn't even a blur when he was beaten to the other end of the dungeons. With dread in his heart, he realized what was happening -- what she was doing to him.
"If you'd fled before we did, she would have cooled me down and stopped me from chasing you. I know it. You know how I know it?"
Another strike, vicious, burning, agonizing to every nerve on his body.
"Because that was the kind of woman she was. She'd already given up revenge when she opened that window."
She was stalking him.
Hunting him.
Turning him into prey -- a target to be dealt with.
"And now she's gone."
The shadows of the dungeon pressed in on him, ravaging his sanity. He saw Marceline in every dark corner, emerging from every open cell and slipping through the bars of the closed ones. No strikes were coming, but one could at any time. He saw her holding his knife, his prized kukri, even though it should have been buried in...
He was crying, and the tears just made it more impossible to see.
The dungeon was silent.
The dungeon was dark.
And Peppermint Butler was helpless to get out.
Then, almost to his relief, Marceline reappeared right in front of him and jabbed something forward. With a sharp gasp, he realized that, yes, Marceline had been holding his blade, and it now stuck out of his midsection, just below the lapels of his suit.
He fell back and tried to close his eyes, ready for it to be over. Instead, Marceline picked him up, pried his eyelids open with her nails, and placed him in a corner next to the entrance stairs.
"You can cut it out with that 'trying to die' bullshit. That stab's not gonna be enough to kill you." Her tone was flat and quiet. "If you're willing to move, you can stumble out somewhere into the kingdom, but you'll eventually have to show your face in a hospital. You won't have enough energy to make it past the gates, on your own or with the help of one of your lackeys... especially with what's about to happen here.
"I can't show my face around this kingdom anymore, thanks to you. Don't take that to mean that I can't still make your short life a living hell. It took you centuries to make up your plan. I already have mine."
With that, she hefted Princess Bubblegum's limp body into her arms.
"Think of me when it's all ending. You can smile when it's over."
Smiling sadly as she told him to, Marceline turned on her heels and floated up beyond the dungeon doors, over the waking Candy Kingdom, and into the black night sky.
Peppermint Butler started moving not long after.