the tea party is interrupted by demon hunters

She'd entered a demon lord's castle as a prisoner and exited it with a month's supply of tea, but that wasn't the most surprising thing about this whole... endeavor, nor was it the smile (if one could even call it that), but the way he had called her name. 

Like it... mattered?

To most people, this would've been the norm, but Reem wasn't most people. 

Or people. 

Or.

A claw seized her shoulder. Reem, against her best interest, flinched. "Good," Sionn said. "Be distressed. Keep walking."

They both did. These trees glowed so much that they were basically lamps. With the way their branches twisted, as though holding the sky, they kind of resembled Sionn's horns.  

Reem had to act distressed. Because...? But anyway, she had to act distressed. She tried.

Someone shot through the cardboard at the entrance, multiple times. Sionn's claw tightened around Reem's shoulder as he sucked his teeth. "Did they really have to ruin the door..." Then he let her go. Sionn stepped ahead of her, just the way the gunslinger had before.

A cloaked figure—in white this time—split the cardboard in two before lunging at them. Two figures with the same attire but a smaller build followed. What a peculiar bunch. They looked like cultists more than bounty hunters. "Formation One!" Cried out the large one, with a surprisingly high voice. "M, get the girl! L, support me!"

They scurried off, which rendered such an entrance pointless, but Reem digressed. Instead of following the intruders with his gaze, Sionn stared at the floor, but Reem had kind of surmised at this point that it was due to some magical demon sixth sense. Something like that. When he tilted his head to the side and a bullet whizzed past his neck, her suspicions were confirmed. 

The larger girl in white summoned her weapon: an axe. It was bigger than all of Reem combined, silly and majestic, so heavy that it made the air sing as she swung it at Sionn. To block this, he used a single claw—the one from his pinkie. Classy. L, the other girl in white, had run off to some tower at the back, where she now aimed at Sionn with... what was the name again? Gun, but big. "Big gun," Reem warned him. "I mean. Uwah! Help!"

"Help is on the way, fair maiden!" Called out M, the single guy in white. This one wielded two pistols. A big bullet from L, two small bullets from M, an axe swing from the big one, all at once...

...and of course he froze time again. "Children," he mumbled. "Should've known."

Sionn ducked under the axe's swing. Now the bullets would hit the walls of the castle, not him. As Reem followed him, she couldn't help but poke at one of them. "It's made of salt," she noted. "Figures. Why didn't you freeze me along with them?"

"I'm not freezing anything. Move out of the bullet's path unless you want a bruise."

"Yessir." This was surreal. Like moving inside a painting. "Uh, Mr. Demon. How often do these happen?"

"Sionn," he corrected. "Ready?"

"Like do you casually survive assassination attempts every night or what? Because if so, that sounds terrible, no offense. Do you kidnap maidens a lot? Are you still sad?"

"I'm not—ugh. Tissue, please." Reem gave it to him. He placed under his nose. "I can't keep this for long. At the count of three."

"Gotcha."

"Two."

...which was when Reem caught a flash at the distance.

"One."

Not just that, but something moving.

The world moved and regained color. The large girl in white swung at the air, then toppled forward. Three salt bullets hit the castle wall. M stopped, baffled. To the children in white, Reem and Sionn had probably just... teleported. Speaking of which, he was now patting Reem's head with his free hand. "I'm feeling generous today," he said. "You have one minute to leave my domain." (This would've probably sounded magnanimous were he not treating a nosebleed.)

Reem squinted at the direction the flash had come from. She saw nothing. It hadn't been her imagination, though.

"Let the damsel go," M feebly quipped, "O-or else."

"Fifty seconds," was Sionn's response. 

There it was! That flash again.

"Told you!" Called out L. "But noo, let's try, they said. We can do it, they said. Now get outta there before he changes his mind."

"But the damsel..."

"Forty seconds," said Sionn.

L was the first to bolt (since all she had to do was jump off the tower and onto a tree). M was second. The axe wielder gave Sionn the finger before running off and, this time, his smile was genuine and, arguably, scarier.

"He won't kill her so it's fiiine!" L said, from afar. "Or he wouldn't have let us go since we're witnesses. Go go go!"

"Twenty seconds."

Reem squinted.

Among the monochrome forest, the blue of the gunslinger's hair stood out to such a degree it seemed almost silly to not have noticed him before. Hadn't Sionn said...? But... no, there he was.

Aiming.

"Ten seconds."

The axe wielder grabbed M by the hood, then hurled him out of the castle, like a javelin. Since she'd wasted a good half a minute ripping her axe off the ground, she wouldn't be able to get out in time. 

"Five... four... three..."

Would he really take a limb?

"Two..."

Was Reem actually going to...

"One..."

Yes she was.

The gunslinger pulled the trigger.

Reem jumped.

As it turned out, a bullet made of salt and not metal still hurt. A lot. Like a lot. Using her body as a shield might not have been the smartest approach.

Naturally, she collapsed. 

She didn't hit the ground, though.

Strange—as dizzy as she was, her senses almost seemed to amplify for some reason. The crunch of grass under feet as the children in white bolted out of the castle. The damp scent of dew-kissed earth. The way she groaned, clutching at her shoulder, even though she hadn't even bled.

Speaking of pointless bleeding, Sionn had caught her and, for the first time, he looked like how he acted. What did they call this expression? Bewilderment?

It was getting hard to think. The salt bullet probably had some kind of tranquilizer, too...

Why didn't the gunslinger just shoot again?

But yeah, it hurt a lot.

No regrets.

None of this made sense.

Fortunately, Reem was to sleepy to care after that, so she decided to take a nap in the arms of a demon.