With preternatural speed, Venatrix sprung towards Stella while thrusting her trident. Stella only barely managed to step out of the way in time, her breath halting as the trident's blazing ochre prongs missed her by an inch.
Venatrix hissed and spun, bringing around the net in her left hand. Stella stepped back again, but this time her feet failed her and Venatrix brought down the net on her head and shoulders. She cried out in pain and alarm as the web of pure energy singed her skin.
Her attacker smiled viciously and pulled the net down further, entangling Stella and causing her to fall to the ground. Failing to hold back tears, Stella watched in childlike terror as Venatrix raised her trident and stepped in for the finishing blow.
Stella had just enough time to say what flashed into her head: "Freezing comet impact!"
There was a deep rumble from above, and Venatrix paused to look up. A ball of snow and ice the size of a small car hurtled towards them, somehow popping into existence just below the plexiglass dome.
"Freezing comet impact" was one of the less useful spells in her limited playbook. Stella had been skeptical when she first learned about it, wondering how an enemy would hold still long enough to get hit. But her life as a small-time thug taught her that the difference between a good trick and a dumb trick was often a question of timing.
And as it turned out, her instinct for timing had been perfect. Venatrix was entangled with Stella thanks to her own net, and she screamed in dismay as the comet lazily plummeted the last few feet to impact.
WHUMP. And then the world was very dark and cold. Stella felt like a little kid (maybe that wasn't too far off nowadays) at a sledding hill who had just wiped out.
She rolled out of the rapidly melting pile of snow, grateful to discover that Venatrix's net had apparently shorted out. She got to her feet and noticed that her attacker was having great trouble trying to do the same.
Note to self, Stella thought. Ice attacks are super-effective against Cleopatra impersonators.
“Venator,” the woman moaned, “I give my strength to you. Teach that degenerate brat how to scream.”
No sooner had she said that when the same freeze-frame effect engulfed her body. Stella looked behind her and saw that Venator, the hulking brute in armor, had unfroze and was now climbing off the platform. She could practically feel the earth shake with the impact.
Oh skittles, oh skittles, oh skittles, she said to herself.
Venator reached up, ripped his helmet off, and cast it to the ground.
The face underneath belonged to a guy who had clearly spent too much time trying to eat live grizzly bears. In Stella's life as Sam, the tough-as-nails street-fighting punk, such men were best dealt with by running away as quickly as possible, because guns usually just made them angrier.
“You hurt my sister, little witch,” Venator growled with a voice like a diesel engine. Red triangles appeared in a swarm around him, linking together to form crude polygonal constructs like something out of an early computer-generated animation. Soon he sported a digital bright red shield and a jagged crimson gladius.
Right then and there, Stella came dangerously close to needing diapers.