Jay - Crazy Diamond

The spider legs scuttled but Jay had already cleared the distance. He slid onto his side and seized the pointy half of the broken spear. Olliebollen flitted toward it trailing dust but Jay spat a sharp "No" to stop her as he rammed the spearpoint into the bark of the nearest tree. It stuck there, the broken shaft quivering, as he picked up the other half and pulled himself to his feet.

Even with the complete spear he couldn't do a thing against Pluxie. Makepeace only annoyed her with a thrust backed by the full momentum of a horse's charge, after all. But if this worked...

He ran away from the part of the spear embedded in the tree. Now that Charisma turned her ire onto Lalum, Pluxie again lumbered toward him, only slightly more hesitant than before. Charisma told her not to kill him, and while Jay doubted for a moment she possessed the intelligence or even physical capability to intentionally follow that order, she did move slower. That made the difference as he dove away from her sweeping lunge, rolled to his feet, held out the broken half of the shaft, and shouted to Olliebollen: "Now!"

Colored dust dropped quick. Pluxie's lunge placed her exactly where Jay had been only moments before—directly between the tree and Jay's current position. Directly between the two halves of the spear.

Olliebollen said it didn't matter how close the pieces were to put them back together. As the dust sparkled on the splinters of the shaft, Jay thought: she better be right.

The shaft left his hand. Not, as he had envisioned in his head, like a rocket, shooting to reattach to its other half. It drifted through the air at a ponderous pace, as though suspended by wires. But when it touched Pluxie's side, it did not stop moving. It did not slow down. It kept going, straight through hundreds of pounds of thick animal fat and muscle and bone, at the exact speed it traveled through air.

It took for the shaft to be half buried for Pluxie to realize; when she swept her claw it already disappeared inside her. Howling, full bulk bristling, Pluxie rolled against the ground, writhing and clenching claws to dredge up chunks of fleshy soil. Her twisting motions reoriented her in relation to the other half of the spear struck to the tree, but the shaft did not care. It moved utterly straight and true and exited out of her gut full red with blood to reattach to its other half. It carried with it strands of gristle and integument, gooey pieces of Pluxie.

***

[5] Goodly Creatures