+ Stack D/Formal Division M98 +
Hands were fishing him out of the pilot cabin.
Outside were walls blistered with air-intake fans and just as many reversed ventilation exhausts, bundled and corded by sheathed fiber-cables running up in several thousand multitudes, dodging aside immobile broadcast vanes and corrugated siding. Metals were washed with rust streaks, with a few hard-bolted ebon gargoyles colored black by dripping waste leaking septic discharges out their eroding maws. It washed down foetid, stinking troughs into a recess dug into the alleway's rockcrete and down an open manhole. The atmosphere was dismal, morose, clinging with sub-standard conditions forcing life to endure. Or break.
Someone took a box-cutter and slashed through Seydon's seat harnessing. He felt limp and deadweight. There were a half dozen voices grousing in animated language, coloured with thick phrases, local argot, brewed by obvious hostility and disdain. They thought the driver was gone. The speeder trickled into the alleyway canyon and soared down for a hundred meters, before pile-driving nose-grill first into solid concrete-mesh. His dress was odd, but those blades strapped close on his back, the axe and longknife, those pivot-knives buckled on his gauntlets would be fetching as war-gear.
They pulled him away from the crumpled hatch-frame and threw him onto a pile of bagged garbage. One of them sauntered up, hunched low, and stabbed his snub-blaster into Seydon's face. His eyes drew open, noticing the lightless barrel punching in at his eye. The gunman paused a moment. Startle paused his killer instinct. Seydon reached and snatched the pistol out of his hand, then punched the gunman's nose back into his skull. Dark, capillary blood jetted from broken cartilage gristle, the gunman tossing back off his feet, struck unconscious.
One, a boyish figure cutting a slash of bright gang-colours, hosting a fake plastisteel eyepatch over his face, was holding his swords. They looked positively gigantic pasted against his slight frame. Seydon stood up from the trash heap and began treading forward, while the other four looters threw themselves at them. Each was a vat-monster, gene-grown with muscle hardwired by chemical and bio sluices that increased their bone ossification and muscle density. Moody stack clansters, jawbreakers, heavy meat-heads, with skulls pierced by steristeel nuts and raised, intentional scar tissue. They had fought and beaten their way through the M98 since the instance they could walk. There wasn't a soul they couldn't crunch in with enough blade-affixed piping and some throaty-barreled slug-magnums.
The Dunaan took them apart. The boy paused stock still, watching stunned at the four-versus-one knuckled melee. He saw the clansters were brooding kickboxers with exaggerated snap-punches and haymakers. By contrast, Seydon was clenched in tight, motions curt, economic, burling in or smacking aside strikes like a coil of liquid steel. The first clanster fell, broken across his left arm from wrist to elbow to shoulder socket and the scapula bone attached. The second knelt over onto his hands and knees while vomit hosed out mouth and nostrils, wretchedly acidic, produced by a forearm blow to his midriff that collapsed several solid organs in against each other. Seydon turned the third one away and disarmed the serrated fillet-knife out of his grasp, kicking his right knee out, following with a one-two-three combination of forearm, elbow, and knee strike that flailed his mandible and skull. He turned towards the fourth: this one considered himself a more accomplished street fighter. He had backed off and then settled into a bouncing stance that kept him leveled and rock-secure. He raised a mailed hand, tied with gym-strip, and beckoned Seydon on with a taunt.
The boy still keeping a shocked hold on his pilfered scabbards winced. Clanster number four flew back off his feet by a snap-kick he didn't even see. Something had been traumatized to mulch inside his mid-torso. He hit the opposite wall and pulverized a dozen slimy bricks with his ramrod spine and meat-hank backside. And then he toppled forward onto his face against the muddied road and began bleeding out his mouth.
Seydon took his blades and scabbard back from the boy, though gently. The lad's hands were shivering pale and the heavy gulp bobbing in his throat like a goiter spoke for his mortal fear. His companions, at least he thought so, were all slowly writhing on the dirty earth in gross pain. He blinked up at the Dunaan.
"...That was cool."
"Do you have family or anywhere to stay, 'till all this blows over?" Seydon asked.
"Sorta. I don't know," He replied. "Haven't seen 'em in a while."
"Have they retained their address?"
"'Retaina - wha'?"
"Have they moved?"
"Nah," The boy sniffled, looking at that last clanster, curled over with either arm clutched at his sternum. "But they ain't got much like food or water, and the beds I remember were lumpy a lot. Been... Been trying..."
Seydon nodded, keeping his face locked stoic. "Was it safe where they lived?"
"I guess."
"Then go and hole up. You keep with these freaks," Seydon nodded at the gang-muscle splayed around them. "And either you'll get shot at the front. Or clubbed in the back."
"Not 'less I do 'em dirty first," And the boy grinned maliciously. The Dunaan tried to not let that expression disturb him.
"Just get up somewhere safe."
"You're letting me go?"
"You take anything else of mine?"
Reluctantly, the boy plucked a thong of narrow, black leather string out of his pocket, wove through a small, black volcanic-glass ring etched with gold. He handed it back over to Seydon. The next moment, he was sprinting up the alleyway, cutting left onto a main streetway. Out of sight. The Dunaan found himself left alone to his own safety amidst hab-stacks hacking each other apart in the wake of planetary destabilization. He considered how much affect he could actually wrought against the chaos, if the best he could accomplish was sacking moody-gangers in the back of a stinking alleyway...
