Davina Jones was on the floorboard, her body low, her eyes all of them tracking every movement around her. The pirates of the Black Ledger pressed in from all sides, their blades raised, their faces twisted with the hunger for blood.
She pulled out a blade that was near her thighs a hidden dagger, strapped to her leg, concealed by her torn pink coat. The steel gleamed in the storm-light.
Then she began a rolling attack.
Her body turned rolling across the deck, spinning through the chaos, dodging the attacks of enemies that were trying to stab her continuously. Blades stabbed into the wood where she had been. Boots stomped where her head had rested. She moved like water, like shadow, like something that could not be caught.
She used the opportunity to grab the weapons of other pirates.
Her hand snapped out snatching a cutlass from a falling enemy, claiming a dagger from a dying man, collecting whatever steel she could find. Sometimes she used the weapons as shields raising them to block incoming strikes, letting them shatter under the force of the attacks.
The weapons broke.
And she used that to her advantage.
Her fingers closed around the shards sharp, jagged, deadly and she threw them at her opponents. The fragments flew through the air spinning, glinting, finding throats and eyes and hearts.
She grabbed one pirate by the leg.
Her hand wrapped around his ankle, yanking him off balance, pulling him to the floor. He fell his body crashing against the deck, his neck landing directly on a shard of a broken blade.
The shard pierced into his neck.
Blood sprayed. His eyes widened. His body convulsed. He died in seconds.
Without wasting time, she grabbed that same dead pirate body.
Her hands dug into his collar, lifting his corpse, swinging it like a club. The body was heavy dead weight, unbalanced, unwieldy. But she swung it anyway.
She turned it into a weapon.
Darlington saw it.
His eyes those observer's eyes that missed nothing tracked every movement, every choice, every impossible adaptation.
"Quite an effective weapon," he murmured. "Large enough to cause physical damage. And well enough to use to take enemies' attacks..." He paused. "...without being directly in the sight of danger."
He watched Davina swing the corpse watched it slam into three pirates, knocking them back, shattering their formation.
He smiled.
The chapter ended there in the space between the corpse's arc and the daughter's desperation, between the dead weight in her hands and the life still burning in her eyes.
Davina swung.
The pirates fell.
And the sea roared