Only Better Than Yesterday

[Seydon of Arda]

The cultists had regrouped. They formed up behind their commander and eased into pincer-prongs that stalked down the hillside. Bolstered by their commander waking from their semi-permanent fugue of disinterest, re-arming their spent blaster SMG's and slug pistols, now trading back Samael's fire with staccato fusillades, pouring las-fire into earth and underbrush. Lines of swaying, tooth-leafed vascular shrubbery turned to smoking pulp, fat and truncated sour apple groves sliced at the trunk and collapsed with boughs trembling, punctuated by wild ululations. Spores, winged seeds, and partially vaporized wood fibre floated in the smoke. Somebody had collected a carbine rifle from the hands of a corpse and was peeling the bark off Samael's cover, roasting shots into the wood. The commander clanked a fresh fragmentation round into their long rifle. It fired and sailed the round over the Mandalorians head, bursting the undergrowth behind him, trying to scare the Rekali into breaking out into the open.

It said something in their fluid, gutteral tongue, and gestured curtly. Six fighters detached from the pincers, training their aim forward, marching onto Samael with timed bursts of cover fire. All bore viciously serrated vibro-rapiers at their hips. One of them licked out a long, split tongue, pierced through their brow and neck by threaded duraplast bolts. They were relishing a close fight. Blaster rounds continued to lick and pound into the tree line. The commander had by then reloaded and was utilizing its heavy armament as a makeshift mortar. Explosions crept up behind Samael, trying to make him shift out of cover. A voice in the shrunken crowd began to laugh -

Then it began gurgling and choking on their own hot blood. Seydon blinked against the arterial wash spraying onto his face, drawing Razorlight into a hacking diagonal blow, severing another body through their spine and belly. Mist and dew-water clung at his scratched, pitted armour. He parried through a handful of shocked, retaliatory strikes, winding his steel through their defence strokes and poking wounds through their throats, rib cages. A hand still clutching onto a chattering machine-pistol went sailing. The assault on Samael's position halted miserably, the pincers dissolving. Now in range, Seydon drew a cleave across the Commander: they were out of range by a pace, but they'd raised that damned heavy rifle with its reinforced charge-barrel out of defensive instinct. Razorlight smacked into its steel casing and raggedly pummelled the firing and breech loading mechanisms, slicing a cleaner line in the follow up blow horizontally along the shoulder stock. The gun rolled away through the grass, ruined and useless.

[member="Samael Rekali"]

 

[Arage Bao]

[SIZE=10.6667px]The Blackthorn had been a shock trooper in the old Sith Wars. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Sent into the brink of fire, on the frontlines, breaking through the most fortified locations and assigned to the heaviest skirmishes. These trials had left his nerves steeled, his resolve strong and unshaken… at least during those times that psychological conditioning took over. When instinct moved his body and made him lapse in minutes of realtime.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]A blink and he was firing his powered revolver into the crowd. Another blink and Samael was running, the beskar-plated grip swinging in his hand against one of the barbarians -- he bellowed and as the grip punched into the skull of his enemy, he could [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]feel[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px] it crunch under the force. The dying enemy was screaming in pain, but Sam wasn’t there anymore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]His movement had blurred. At this point he was less man and more nature. Predator moving by his instincts and felling opponent after opponent, the lines of the barbarians had broken apart in the onslaught of a Witcher and a Mandalorian.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Where Seydon’s movements were fluid, graceful even and smooth, Rekali’s fighting style was heavy-handed with a lot of power behind his swings, brutal crushes and blunt damage dished out in mere seconds.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]This went on for a while. Until finally nothing was left alive except one [member="Seydon of Arda"] and one tired, wounded Samael. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Samael's hard panting went in hand with a sudden, brittle wind. Blood was cooling even as heat began to leach out of prostrate and broken corpses, fluids settling and congealing in dirty puddles wriggling with attracted vermin come to have their fill on the bodies. Tenupe's ecosystems were rabid and opportunistic. The death on the air brought murders of red-beaked magpies, envenomed monitor lizards stirred out of late evening dozes sunning in the heat, small clouds of bright, jewelled beetles flicking by their faces that landed and began biting massive pincer-jaws into the lips and soft eyes of the dead. Seydon sheathed Razorlight away, and began rummaging through the cadavers.

“You alright?” He asked up at the Mandalorian. The cultists preferred scabbed together costumes, brightly camouflaged in floral colour schemes, inked and pierced across chosen hanks and stretches of skin. A few bore familiar 'acid-tats' common to underhive and metropolitan recidivist gangs, others as yet unmarred, only newly joined and interrupted before they could decide on a totemistic or tributary design meant to evoke animal or godly power. Their firepower was culled from all manner of surplus weaponry leaked to the black market: Browncoat, Tenloss, Blas-Tech, the rarer las-lock antiques, and nasty, nail-plated depleted baridium grenades. “Got a poultice or two, if you've got abrasions or concussed.”

[member="Samael Rekali"]

 

[Arage Bao]

[SIZE=10.6667px]“No.” No to what? No to the first or the second question? Or both. Samael wasn’t alright, not by a long shot. The moment the bloodsong died down he realized what had happened. The scattered corpses, the empty eyes staring to the heavens, the last words dead on their lips, their souls screeching softly as they detached themselves from the rotting bodies and went wherever they ought to go after such an abrupt parting. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]“This should not have happened.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Sam had left Mandalorian Space exactly to prevent this from happening. His armor was scorched at places. Old bones ached and the muscles worn tight from the excursion. There was blood all over him, and the grip of his re-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]A piece of brain tissue.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]The old warrior dropped the revolver, its touch too scorching to bear. His knee started to ache again, burning, almost as if it wanted to tell him something. That it would be okay. That things hadn’t changed yet, that he could still go back to being [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]just[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px] a guide in some remote corner of the Galaxy without worrying about the blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]But that ain’t right, innit? Can run. Can try to hide. But at the end of the day your shadow always catches up on you. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]He steeled his nerves, or tried to at least. Pulling the frayed ends back together as best as he could, the last thing Seydon needed now was an old buck playing tricks. A mid-life crisis wouldn’t help anyone right now.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]“I am fine, comparatively.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px][member="Seydon of Arda"][/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The Dunaan looked up from the commander; it was a body with its torso pitted open by rapid revolver fire and someone running parallel striations through the rib cavity. Samael was visibly swaying on his boots, fighting off a sick palour threatening his haggard complexion. He'd dropped his gun between his feet having just freshly tossed out a scoop of brain-matter he had been clenching on to for the past minute. A heartfelt pain had found his eyes and coated his words. The steely impervium mannerisms that he had first met Seydon had been replaced with acidic revulsion at the violence that laid ponding out through the grass and bracken.

“...If you say so,” The swordsman said, after a beat. It began to rain: the breeze chilled into their skin before pausing altogether, rainfall falling and bouncing off their gloves and shoulders. He was between sympathy and unease. Veteran spacers were no more or less vulnerable to becoming emotionally unsettled, but he frankly didn't understand the psycho-somatic underpinnings that governed and differed one individual's reaction to post-conflict fatigue to another's. Lecturing, goading, patronizing, or condescending could put off his threadbare state further. Seydon coughed softly, looking back to the corpse at his knee.

“But it did happen,” He said after a minute. “And nothing can be helped now. You can stay here, come along with me if you want, or hunker back in your ship. Anyway you decide, it's all fine by me. I'm not done here yet.”

[member="Samael Rekali"]

 

[Arage Bao]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Sam coughed, before looking Seydon in the eyes. It wasn’t the violence itself that disgusted him, no few Mandalorians were truly sensitive to such matters - desentized from a lifetime of training and actual warmongering. No, it was the fact that he slipped back into it so [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]easily[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px], there hadn’t been any hesitation, no doubts, no fear in his mind: just the actions and soft pleasure received from doing a job [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]well[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]And it was that pleasure. That sensation of [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]enjoying[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px] himself killing people, because he was [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]good[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px] at it, was what made him sick. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]“Signed up for a job, Wolf. Gonna see it through, one way or another.” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]The revolver was picked up again, the tissue rubbed off and the gun returning to its holster. It was only after that act that he realized he had forgotten something.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]“You contacted me before this… [/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]mess[/SIZE][SIZE=10.6667px]. Found something?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Focus on the job. Forget the rest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]But perhaps that was his problem all along. He hid from his nature, then when it got real bad he crashed and ran from it, rarely did Samael Rekali own up to his own faults completely. There was always that sarcastic remark, that self-deprecating joke followed by leading the thoughts into a different direction.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px]Getting too old for this angsty feel-bad stuff.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6667px][member="Seydon of Arda"][/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

They hurried with scavenging in the rain. Seydon had wanted to further investigate the effigy Samael had reported finding their numbers bowed under, huddled in moaning clusters, praying noetic hymns for the might of some unknown deity. He made do collecting observations on the corpses he rummaged through, passing ammunition magazines to the Mandalorian for inspection, keeping any whetstones, herbal pouches, and bare items counting as ingredients to himself. The Commander had been a specimen unto itself. Both of them had a look at its broad yet unnervingly androgynous characterizations that it hid under 'wasteland' style cloth and scrap-iron casement, with a wrinkled, flat face, dark flesh, and blank, onyx eyes. Either an unrecorded species that wandered out of the Unknown Reaches, a genetically constructed vat-clone, or in all likelihood a lesser Sithspawn. Samael asked if this one was at all what the Dunaan was looking for.

Seydon didn't know, and couldn't. The Griffin witchers kept their own affairs, outside of contract hunts, preferring the secrets of their own company to fraternizing with the limited brethren of the other Ysian schools. It was a possibility their searches for arcane secrets belonging to their exiled culture led them to branch out from tradition. Seydon shut out any more private conjecture, rising and brushing off the mud and blood dampening his cloth knee-pads. The weather had finally caught up with them and they were out from cover. He spared Samael much conversation, marching into the underbrush back eastward.

The rain was sleeting, pouring down in grey, shimmering walls, bringing in a mist from off the moorlands surrounding the crater valley. Previous, choking warmth fled, replaced by an ice-water cold. It drenched into their exposed skin, chiming arhythmic beats off Samael's cowled armour. Progress re-tracing Seydon's prior tracks was taken with slow care, the pair keeping armed with blade and rifle respectively. Once, they melted against cover offered by a stand of slate rock jambs, waiting in the storm, training their ears for a crackling footfalls both swore they heard snap in the dim wilds around them.

“There,” Seydon said. “Up there.”

They'd made it to a butte rock face jawing out from the hinterlands opposite where Samael had stumbled upon the cult activity. Etched and cleaved into the stone were camouflaged steps, forming zipping switchbacks upward to the lip of a small canyon mouth. Cloud overcast had turned the sunlight grey, adding abyssal depth to the shade and shadows. The wind was a keening edge coming down the bare cliff, ghastly and dry as a death croak.

[member="Samael Rekali"]

 

[Arage Bao]

Sam appreciated the silence. Instead he just helped pick apart the usable gear the cultists had, stacking up the ammo and exchanging his lackluster rifle with something with more... umphf. Not that there was a lot of choice for good equipment here. Most of the things were medieval -- swords, a few hammers, a dagger here and there, one man even had a bow with a quiver filled with what looked like were poisoned arrows. Not especially effective against durasteel, but he imagined that against others who wore simpler armor it would have been fairly effective. The Mandalorian eventually picked up a rusty shotgun, checking it over for mechanical defects, before shrugging and taking it up.

The ammo went in a separate pouch. That left him with a spare revolver when things got really sticky and the shotgun for the better part of the mission, he had fought with worse odds against him... naw, this was good enough.

The journey was short, but he wasn’t surprised about that. Seydon’s speedy arrival already tipped him off that whatever was of interest was nearby -- and it only served to fuel the suspicion he had that both things might be connected with each other.

You don’t have a bunch of cultists doing weird ritualistic stuff next to a secret cave opening and not have it somehow involved with each other.

And Samael would eat his hat if it were two separate things.

“I see it.” he looked up it, squinting to make out more details, before looking around.

“Who is gonna take point?”

[member="Seydon of Arda"]