The two stood in the arena in silence, the crowd murmuring as they watched the two young girls stand at opposite ends. Maribelle shook like a leaf, head frantically spinning from one end of the arena to the other with an expression of terror on her face. She didn’t look like she belonged in the arena, her attire akin to that of a gothic doll with black frills and blue ribbons in her ebony hair. Gloves that ran from her fingertips to her elbows looked to be in pristine condition, her hands flailing to cover up her face.

“Please! I’m begging you to stop! I don’t want to be here!” Her cries now echoed through the enclosure with nary a response. Even though Foxtail was in a readied stance and the need for victory to secure Peepers safety gnawed at her with a relentless simmering fury, her heart wasn’t in the fight. The girl looked so helpless and frail, quaking in her black dress shoes like a gnarled tree than a proper opponent.

“Maribelle?” Foxtail called out. Maribelle yelped in response and fixated her scared gaze on her.

“D-d-don’t come any closer!” Maribelle lifted her hand, pointing her finger at Foxtail in an accusatory manner. “You’re n-n-not trustworthy!” She bit her lip trying to hold back tears. Foxtail held both of her hands up to her chest and made a slow step forward. Maribelle gasped at her movement and recoiled, taking a step back.

“Listen, Maribelle… we can work things out,” Foxtail took another step forward, “You don’t seem like you want to be here and I don’t want to hurt you so can’t you surrender?”

“N-n-no. I can’t surrender because then everyone else will get mad at me.”

“Everyone else? You mean your boss? Well your boss agreed to the fight’s conditions so I don’t think he’d mind if we just put on a show for the crowd and then ended things.”

“No! You don’t understand. He made me p-p-promise them that I’d do better! That I’d be brave and my friends told me it’d be okay!” Foxtail watched as her echoes drew away from Maribelle, the danger they perceived radiating off of her growing in size and influence. “And I want to be b-b-brave but the pressure is… it’s too much.” Foxtail’s anger, the simmering fury in the pit of her gut began to mix with a growing annoyance. Foxtail made a steady pace towards Maribelle, the frail girl taking equal steps backwards until her body was firmly pressed in the crevices of the jutting stones. Even as her echoes called her back, she pressed forward until she was mere arms length of her opponent.

“Stop with your goddamn whining!” Foxtail swung with her baton overhead, clubbing Maribelle with a dull wet thud. She fell over. Not moving. Foxtail stood there for a moment, a low tremor building in the crowd. And then the storm cloud appeared over Maribelles head, a small tuft of black that crackled with thunder and flashed lightning. An intense downpour came down on her head, makeup running black in the arena, Foxtails surroundings becoming obscured.

“I tried and tried but it just wasn’t enough.” Maribelle murmured, her whisper slithering into Foxtail’s ear. “But I have my friends here… even if I’m not brave, they’ll always take me for who I am…” She mumbled, her body being lifted from the ground by a series of black hands, stretching from palm to palm like a rope and wrapping around her like a collar. “They say you can be afraid of everything if you have a friend to face the world with. Do you have any friends? Foxtail?” Foxtail stared in horror at the frail girl, her dress drenched, hair tangled and messy clinging to her skin, and smokey black water that kept pouring from her open mouth like a waterfall. Where her frantic eyes once were, merely sockets remained, distinct ink drawn within to give Maribelle a cheerful expression.

Suddenly, Foxtail was knocked over to the side, her arm searing in pain and black from where she was touched. A distinct handprint lingered on her body, a smudge on the hoodie sleeve as well as on her skin, from the looks of the liquid dripping out of the sleeve. She turned around, her head foggy, the world opaque and nebulous like the lights were dwindling all around her. She could see her echoes, cowering in the distance, and ran towards them, towards safety.

“But we’ve only just met…” One hand tugged on Foxtails leg, then two, then four, worming around her leg, a snake coiling and constricting. A forceful tug lifted Foxtail up, her body crashing to the ground. She saw her echoes drift further and further away as she kicked at what felt like water. Turning to face her opponent, she saw her leg was fine, whatever had wrapped around her gone as quickly as it had arrived. “We were promised friends… We were promised fun…” Disembodied voices in the darkness whispered under their breaths, amidst the growing incoherent chatter of people laughing and singing. Soft pitter patters of feet on puddles of water came from every which way Foxtail couldn’t see. She lifted herself from the ground and ran towards her echoes once more, a cavalcade of steps following closely behind her and then not at all with every shift of her head back at a gnarled and fidgeting Maribelle.

“Don’t leave us!” Foxtail crackled her baton to life, the electricity arcing around the rod giving her glimpses into the encroaching darkness around her and light to reflect on the veil of water on the ground. On the floor, she could see things moving, humanoid shapes coming after her with shifting limbs, amorphous bodies that stretched and squashed in chaos. Her legs on fire, right leg doubly so from the lingering burns on the skin, she leapt and tumbled into the bright arena as if forcing her way out of a thin veil of liquid smoke.

The crowd broke out in applause, incoherent yelling and screaming with men and women trading around Ahn watching the show.

Too close. Close. Too strong. Strong. Just run away and forget all of this… Her cowardly echoes chimed, none of them daring to crawl any closer to the border between her and the sphere of influence Maribelle had generated.

Foxtail disregarded their comments, shook away the ringing in her ears from the yelling and the disembodied whispers and took a breath. She stood in silence with her weapon in hand, observing the threshold she had escaped from slowly widening around the illuminated space left in the arena.