Shards of glass skipped and skittered across the empty dojo room. A figure dressed in a white stola crumpled to the ground a few feet from the broken window. Slowly, Quintessa raised her head and looked about at the room; her pale green eyes peering into the darkness between her only slightly lighter strands of hair.

“Must find a weapon, something, anything,” Tess’ voiced whispered in Quintessa’s ear. “Get up! Get up before she comes back!” Quintessa rolled her eyes at the frightened voice in her head. She fought hard against the panic that was rising from her stomach, rising to her brain and fogging up her senses.

The night’s few moments passed quickly through the mind of the vengeful huntress; all passing at ten times the speed they had occurred.

Quintessa remembered a hospital, a white hallway, a dark room, a young man, turning slowly into a young vampire. She’d sensed this one much more strongly than she had sensed any other, she’d been closer at the time of his making and felt the small anomaly that made him what he was, a mistake. She’d looked at him then with a small amount of pity, Jose – the young med student, so close to finishing his residency – reduced to nothing more than a sniveling creature soaked in his own bloody vomit. He was unable to drink living blood, an extremely rare divergence in the genetic make up of his slowly adapting cellular system that made him fundamentally flawed from the very beginning of his immortal existence. He could never survive on his own, would never be able to grow strong enough to leave his sire - lest he die of hunger.

Quintessa had killed him. She’d broken his body, his bones snapping like twigs in her empowered hands. She’d slit his wrists and bled him dry, and the she’d beheaded him. The body she’d burned in the last rays of sunlight, the head she’d left as a reminder to his sire, a young and impulsive Tsuka Nitta, that only the strong survived in the underbelly of natural life. That’s when the doctor had come after her. The Ancient Reaper was challenged by a vampiric doctor just shy of five hundred years…they’d fought and then Tess had come back. The waifish vampire had returned at just the wrong moment, giving Quintessa no choice but to flee. The two women had seemingly made it far from the doctor, until the Japanese vampire caught them outside this building, and promptly kicked them through its front window.

Now she was coming back to finish them off.

“I will do what is needed to keep us alive,” Quintessa hissed back at Tess, her annoyance with her double overwhelming the fear the other felt. “But you must allow me to do so!” Tess fell silent, allowing Quintessa to focus on the situation at hand. Her eyes skipped over several weapons lining the wall until they finally settled on a glimmering katana. Quintessa picked herself up off the floor and charged for the sparkling weapon. She tore the thing from its display hooks and turned towards the window. She swung the weapon a few times in the air, familiarizing herself with its weight and feel, and then brought the blade to a vertical resting place, the moonlight sprinkled object hovering just millimeters from the tip of her nose.

Quintessa’s eyes narrowed as the black silhouette of her opponent came to rest at the centre of the window frame; the white moon seemed to encircle the woman’s head in a halo of white light.

Their night had only just begun.

Tsuka's eyes blazed. She had had no right. No right at all to murder her young kin. Rightly, Tsuka had had no right to sire him, but it had been a choice between life and death. Snarling, she stared at the rising figure through the shattered dojo window. Tsuka was now breaking every rule in her personal book of honour, but that could be excused by the fact that she was dealing with a dishonourable gaijin. 'The other problem', thought Tsuka, 'is that I have no training with weapons of any kind.' It hadn't been permitted in her class during her life span. Tsuka could not go back on what she had already started. She would have to rely on both her illusions and her vampiric strength that was unnatural to her body. Picking up a long shard of glasses and wrapping the end like a handle in her left shirt sleeve, she stepped through the hole in the glass. She would defend. She would attack. She might even kill.

Grasping the shard of glass, Tsuka stared across the room. The other women was rather old...and powerful. The other women was also wielding a long katana. This weapon was quite familiar to Tsuka's eyes. Perhaps the glass wouldn't be enough...but it was all she had for now. Grabbing three other long shards, Tsuka threw them at the other figure while running toward Quintessa.

"Why did you murder him?!" Tsuka began yelling, "He was MY responsibility! He had much ahead of him!"

Quintessa dropped to one knee to duck below one highflying shard of glass. She tucked into a ball and somersaulted under a second lower piece and brought her katana up against the final projectile, sending it skipping away. Her eyes followed Tsuka dangerously.

"You try my patience Jap wench," Quintessa hissed as she rose to a standing position, the katana gripped tightly in her right hand, the edge reflecting moonlight about the room in tiny flecks. "This could all be over much faster if you would just accept that the survival of the species is dependent on our kind being independent." Quintessa moved quickly, to the far corner of the room, fading into the shadows and waiting for Tsuka to follow.

((OOC: sorry for the short post but Quintessa is talking and Tess is refusing to speak to me right now x_x' ))

"Independent? We ARE independent...and once the boy had been put on his feet he would have been fine. He would have adapted. Struggle is how we become stronger. We adapt. How do you believe you could have lived all these years without adapting somehow? You and I are influenced by the culture that surrounds us." Tsuka stepped toward the shadows, the longer shard of glass still held in her hand, eyeing the silver gleam that was the katana held by Tess. How dare that bitch even lay her foreign hands on that steel. It was a personal insult. Swords, beautiful swords were not meant to be touched by lesser hands. Not those of Japanese steel.

"What do you expect from them? What do you expect from the newly sired? What made him so much weaker and insignificant then all the other young ones in our world?" Tsuka crouched down, not taking her eyes from the hovering sword, the only indication she had to Tess's whereabouts and grabbed a pole with a short blade on the end. This seemed practical for both offense and defense.

"You have not yet explained your reason for slaughtering an ally. My...son...my young one. To us." Tsuka opened her mind and pushed her illusions around her body and into the shadows. "What do you see Slayer?"

“He was genetically incapable of mixing with the vampire essence that you have flowing through your veins,” Quintessa’s voice was unfeeling; the blunt truth was her only method of dealing with people. “His body rejected living blood, he could only drink from dead sources – a weakness I don’t think either of us would like to see passed on to future generations.”

“His system hadn’t been fully cleared of unusable organs and his own blood was still producing traces of hemoglobin, drinking blood only made him sick, don’t you see Tsuka, we had to stop him!” Tess was trying to be more sympathetic, trying to explain the situation to the doctor in a manner she hoped the professional woman would understand. But Tsuka didn’t appear to be listening; in fact she was disappearing, becoming engulfed in an expanding shadow that Tess could not explain. “Quintessa, where’d she go?”

“It’s some kind of trick,” Quintessa forced Tess back and took control of the situation. “You may not be able to see her, but I can sense her.” Quintessa let her mind wander into the murk forming in the room. She felt Tsuka’s presence at its very core, and allowed a thin smile to cross her face. Quintessa brought her katana above her head and charged into the darkness, never trusting her sight, only her feelings – which told her Tsuka was in this direction.

Tsuka had long since slipped off her shoes and now stepped far aside from the physical illusion she had placed in her stead. As Tess charged through the illusions, Tsuka swung her pole down onto her. After hearing a crack, she backed away, unknowing of whether or how hard she had hit her attacker. The asian woman was a whore, not a fighter.

"He worked in a hospital, Ama. He is surrounded by dead blood. He had a different structure. Hell, we could
have used him to study the effects of vampirism...Have you never wanted to revert to your mortal life? There is...was...a thousand possibilities for him. Why do you have so little faith in your own kin?" Tsuka glared from behind her illusions, slowly backing into a corner.

The doctor was not a fighter. A killer, yes, but not a warrior, not intended to use the beauty of swords. She was a whore. As she shifted the grasp of her left hand, the image of her mizuage, virgin night, flashing into many nights in dark rooms, fading to the act of feasting on the same man from her mizuage. She was a killer, she was a doctor, she was definitely a whore, but not a warrior. As she wove her illusions, bare feet moving across the floor. This was quickly going to turn into a game of survival.