Meanwhile, on the other side of the country:
She hit the Earth as solid and as hot as a meteor.
BAM!
"Oh my goodness," an elderly woman exclaimed.
"I've never seen the like," her husband agreed.
Of course, in spite of their advanced age, they felt they simply had to investigate.
She'd struck the planet not a quarter mile from where they stood. It took them a half hour to work their way through the woods to where she'd landed.
The couple walked right up to the crater and peered in. Whatever'd dropped out of the sky had really thwacked into the ground. The crater was a good eight, ten feet deep. The foliage around the crater was in flames. The couple expected to see a burning rock at its center.
Instead, they saw a woman.
They saw her by the light emanating from the flames.
She stood seven feet tall. She was covered in black soot and ashes from head to toe. Therefore, except for her glowing red eyes, she looked completely black, black as coal.
The old couple couldn't believe what they were seeing. "Uh...Uh...Wa...Wa..."
The woman peered at them with an expression but was both filled with fury yet utterly cold. "Where are we?" she asked in perfect English.
"Who...Who..."
The woman leaped from the pit she herself had created to stand in front of the now petrified couple. "I asked WHERE AM I?"
"Who...Who..."
"Fools!" She had no more time for them. With a swipe of her arm, she killed them both. She was so super-humanly powerful she was able to chop right through their aged torsos as with as axe, cutting them both in half. She looked all around herself, especially at the sky, to get her bearings, but then she smiled at looked west.
To confront my prey, I must travel in that direction, she thought.
She rose into the sky as if gravity had no effect on her whatsoever, and she darted, like a rocket to the west. If she saw a body of water she'd dip into it until, at last, the dirt and grime had completely washed away from her body, until she was, once again, exactly who she was, her skin shining black and harder than the hardest diamond, far harder than any substance on Earth.
Coal. That's what she looked like. Walking coal. Her eyes glowed red in the darkness like burning coal. Something that looked like a cape hung from her neck, and the cape looked made out of coal.
Her name was Tindriss.
She was the assassin from Boran D.
She'd just been chosen, by The Fours, for the assignment she'd longed for all her life.
She deadheaded for Seatrailia, for the home of one Mr. Adam Forwarder.
END OF CHAPTER SIX