Pariah of Wolves

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“You send them into the black forest, the pit, the ruin. You send them where you wouldn’t send your worse enemy, with a promise of payment when they get back. Just have your coin ready. Because they always come back, and with the head of the thing you need dead.” ~ Master Sergeant Viggin Hale, 62nd Scouts Guard, Republic Infantry - Obscurus: A Portrayal of the Unknown / Chapter 66: Dunaan – [BBY 3945][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]By Request of Senatorial Authority[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Senator Rel Connory – Office of Eshan[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Interregnum Governmental Institution — Penal Colony № 82B Maximum Penitentiary Service of Contruum [/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Sequestered Archival Recording – Pending Ongoing Investigation[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]AUDIO/VISUAL HOLO-CAM FILE/S: 667:85A:NUU6 – 682:33U:ZYL9[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]SOLITARY CONFINMENT BLOCK “SANGUINE”: ROW 1[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Please Enter Authority Key: [***************][/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Thank You ~ Please Proceed[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]TRANSCRIPT TRANSLATION OF HOLO-CAM RECORDED FILE[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Sector/System: Truum Sector – Contruum System – Contruum[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Location: Penal Colony № 82B Maximum Penitentiary “Greyram” Service of Contruum[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Date: 837 ABY[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Recovered From Penitentiary Armour-Sunk Servers / Recording Back-Up[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Overseen for Audio/Visual Repair + Fidelity[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Transcript Rendered By: P.K. Dick / F.P Herbert, Jr. / D. Abnett / A. Sapkowski[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Hall A – Row 1:] Brief white noise/loss of sound. Source unclear. [Visual/Audio loss apprx. 1.02 seconds] Quality restores. Austere, crisp monochrome coloration. Sound is metallic. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Out of Field:] Sound: Auto-door activation, confirmed biometric identification. Sixteen second pause, then: Seven figures. Visual Identification obscured. Digital Ident Scan: Six members of Max-Sec Overwatch Guard Personnel. One High Risk [Prisoner 1]. [Visual shudder.] Blur of activity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Details Indistinct. Noted Audio growling.] [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE I: - Ain’t even holdin’ the damn thing roight, fethin’ cobslob, ya first day, ya?![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]MSOG I: Restrain him. Tighter. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]MSOG II: He’s trying to bite through my elbow guard![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE I: -Fnnggghhrrrrr! [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]MSOG IV: Administering electro-jolt![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Camera flash-blinds. Indistinct howl of human pain.][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE I: BASTIDS! You ain’t got me! Ya ain’t got me! Ghessen had it commin’, he did! Stopped me from takin’ his uthah tongue! Thas’ all you did![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]MSOG III: Get him into the cell. Knock out his legs. No more time wastage. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE I: Is that what you think ya are? Ya think ya’ll are in charge…? GYYNNAAGGH![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][2nd Camera flash-blind.] Burly, padded figures surge a limp figure forward between them. Group musters out of Cam-Sight.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam / Block Sanguine – Row 1:] Powerful bodily frames enter the shot, backs turned. One hulked figure, scarred with augment plugs, is tossed between their arms. Visual Identification of Prisoner 1 continually obscured. Prisoner 1 is dragged before Cell 6A ‘Arnhem’. MSOG V unlocks Cell Containment Protocols. Shields are recorded falling. [Track Cam zooms, following blurred motion, as Prisoner 1 - ][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][ - Bodily thrown into Cell 6A. Shake in visual feed. Audio preserved.] Prisoner 1 turns about, numb on floor. Shielded auto-door crawls back into place. Locks. Hands clamber face up to the barring. [Image Still: Zoom & Clean: Prisoner 1 identified as HRI-0099 “Stenwulf”. Ident File Inconclusive. Mercenary. Wanted for 84 Counts of Violent Crime perpetrated against Contruum Citizenry. Includes Assault W/ Weapon. 1st, 2nd, 3rd Murder. Manslaughter. Contraband Narcotics Distribution. Counts of Aggravated Sexual Assault. Former Leader of Mercenary Unit “Seyda”. Found wounded. Citizens arrest.][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Prisoner 0099 is visibly enraged. Classified behavioral aggression. Commits various obscene gestures. [Track Cam turns. Follows MSOG Unit out of frame. Cuts to:][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Hall A – Row 1:] Light tints off environ-sealed breath-masks. MSOG Unit continues departure.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF (Off): Jus’ takes a quartah-uv-an-howah! Get my legs by then! There’s nothin’ this Gods damned place can do – to hurt me! Gimme my blade! See who owes who what then, aye!? Ya ain’t shid, ya ain’t shid on a stick, ya [REDACTED] swabbin’ [REDACTED]’s! I carved my way frum Endelaan to Exocron! Greyram won’t hol’ me! Contruum ain’t gonna hold me! Ya hear!? YA HEAR!? FETH![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam: Pan – Zoom – Clean – Zoom:] Prisoner 0099 quiets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Cell 6A:] Details washed by hard light. Monochrome figure limps, paces. Uses numerous occasions to attempt ‘intimidation’ of Stationary Cam. Presumed abuse of Sec-Office On-Station Personnel. [Feed skip: 6 hours.] Prisoner 0099 slumps to bed and attempts sleep. Mutters coherently. [Audio Gain Boosted x2.1][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: S’your fault, Guen… I toldja ‘Just slit a jugulah and let’s be done with it’. Coulden’ lissen, eh? Too busy wonderin’ aftah poor ol’ ‘Nat, aye? Fethin’… Wonderin’ aftah sum bluddy son, aye? …Hear he killed ya! Fethin’ punk. Upstart shidhead. Don’t know a thing. How’s a fether like that supposed to get th’ bettah o’ me, ay!? Oh… I’ll find ‘im.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Cam Feed – Black eyes peer directly into cam feed:][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: I’ll find ‘im…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Speed Cut: Inter-spliced footage showcasing one apprx. month of solitary confinement. Prisoner 0099 utilizes ravenous behavior. Engages in calisthenics. Sabotages inner-cell feed apprx. four occasions. Switch out for:][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Cell 6A:] Prisoner 0099 at rest. Appears in restful, temporary sleep atop cot. Oblivious, uneventful. Shaved collections of duraluminum upon floor. Attempts at creation of concealed weapon? [Feed Cut to:] [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Hall A – Row 1:] Muffled audio. Increase on gain yields slight return. Suddenly: [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Audio Channels 1 – 18:] Siren blare. Harsh, grating, designed for auditory pain and agitation to catch prisoner attention. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Cell 6A:] Cot is emptied. Prisoner 0099 is awake, alerted. Hand flashes with unidentified item; possibly smuggled bladed weapon. Facial scans purport eagerness, keen awareness. Biometric take indicates increasing amygdales activity. Anxiety rising.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: Feth’s gowan on today, eh…?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Hall A – Row 1: Audio] Distant exchanges of auto-fire. Indications of blaster and slug gun discharges. Bass warbles hint at triggered implosions. Chaos of running blast-fire closes swiftly for the High-Max Solitary Confinement Block Sanguine. Stationary Cam feed suddenly, inexplicably cuts. [Audio Channel hints at detonation.][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam / Block Sanguine – Row 1:] Rockrete detritus, pulverized concrete dust, showers of granular and physical debris, explode past the view field. Broken portions of reinforced concrete litter the waxed floor. Lighting briefly fades; infrared cuts in, highlights black/green/white tableau. Light reflects from studying eyes of Prisoner 0099 at Cell 6A door. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Audio Feed:] Multiple auditory sources: voices. Later confirmed penitentiary wide prison-riot. Sound grows into scattered cacophonies. [Channel mixed, isolated for Row 1, Hall A, Track Cam. Pan to:][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Panning shot:] Tall figure, lean, in unidentified combat gear, black, harness strapped. Silver pauldrons. Archaic longsword at hip. Face blanked by death mask. Figure I detaches object from waist-belt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …Hey! Oi! Oi, feth’s sake, what’s… What’s, oh feth, no, put that down, that’s crentex![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Figure I disregards Prisoner 0099 alarm. Bends, attaches object to boxed control-feeds of Cell 6A door frame. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Stationary Cam / Cell 6A:] Prisoner 0099 ducks and flees beneath cot. Shiv flashes briefly in light gleam.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: Feth![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Figure I retreats from Track Cam. Sudden bloom of light, screeching sound. Audio feed immediately cuts. Visual feeds. Loss of fidelity for 9 seconds. Visual feed restablishes. [Zooms to:][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Torn rubble of Cell 6A. Crentex has left a mauled wound gaping in the cell block. Dust settles as cracked strays of stone and building material fall from the ceiling. Figure I stands midst destruction. Waiting. …Movement in Cell 6A remains. Prisoner 0099. [Track Cam: Zoom + Clean/Sharpen/Contrast + Zoom][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Prisoner 0099 is bloodied. Prison uniform is torn in multiple areas: torso, arms, legs. Face is struck by shrapnel, bleeding from laceration. Expression is incensed. Right fist clenches around make-shift dagger. Figure I is unmoved. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …Tryin’ to kill me? That it? S’hat why you’re here, aye? Who sent you…?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Figure I is unmoved. Impassable. Prisoner 0099 makes leaping motion, shiv in pick-grip, aiming to attempt a clavicle stab. [Track Cam: fragmented motion in frame. Too fast to record.] Figure I responds, actions hint at forearm block, grip, twisting disarm. Prisoner 0099 doubles up, choking. Struck multiple times in chest, gut. Throat? Gags and falls back. Figure I raises shiv in hand; breaks the metal in their fingers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: Damn![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Sudden Audio feed. Secondary voice: unidentified. Track Cam pans right. Darkly dressed figures in similar uniform to Figure I fill the empty space. One permits [himself] unmasked. Tall, broad, black haired, hints of trimmed facial hair. Graying. Age unknown. He turns to the prostrate Prisoner 0099 upon the floor and addresses him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: Get up, Mr. Tepes. We need to speak.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam: Zoom + Clean:] Prisoner 0099 looks up. Expression is blank. Emotion is gauged as ‘fear’.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …Oh. …You.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: Yes, Mr. Tepes. Come to claim you from this pit of hell.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …I thought y’died…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: And I you, when reports circulated the Seyda had been destroyed on Contruum. Guenyvhar Gunn is dead. A pity. …You will have to do.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam Zoom + Clean] Dejected. Prisoner 0099 pallor lightens. Subject stands, takes approximate two seconds to oversee Subject (ii)’s entourage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …S’all this jus’ for me?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: Indeed. You underestimate the prowess of how Contruum sees to their own. Or, in your case, errant elements. These individuals are guarantee that our negotiations begin and settle without interruption.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: Negotiation…? Fer fethin’ what, Sennex, hell’s teeth is your gaime ‘ere? This annuthah Denon?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: No, Mr. Tepes. That was only prelude.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: …And wha’ is it I got thah’ makes me worth the effort? ‘Cuz I know you, Sennex… Y’never did anythink without makin’ sure y’broke ovah even.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: Indeed. But those are details that cannot be discussed so nakedly. Rise. We have much work to do.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]STENWULF: So I’m commin’ wid you….?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]VOICE II: Mr. Tepes, please remember my distaste for repeating myself. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][Track Cam pans back, swaying with a slight mechanical jink, filtering white noise.] Prisoner 0099 comes to rise, brushes self free of loose dust, detritus, coughs haggardly. Subject (ii) turns right. No further conversation. Masked entourage fall into step, taking up diagonal guards about Subject (ii)’s person. Figure stops, Subject (iii). Subject (iii) briefly addresses Track Cam above. Motion flicker, too fast to frame-capture. Track Cam feed abruptly ceases. Digital blurs of broken glass and white-snow static. Sound slowly howls into silence.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Theme​

[SIZE=10pt]With thanks to~[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Nadia Perrin[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Jon Olfert[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]& Acknowledgement of~[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Andrzej Sapkowski[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Dan Abnett[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]Masaya Hashimoto & Tomoyohi Miyazaki[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]~Tingel Arm~[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]~The Indigo Reef~[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt][Arda, Six Months Later…][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lizard gull was hungry. Ferociously starving. Two days and nights of aimless winging on the forever-search for ruby-salmon and what Sendan called ‘dragon tuna’, with only a gnawing, increasingly hollow ache in the stomach-sack nestling in its bulbous fridge of ribs. Lizard gulls were the third largest predatory avians native to Arda. They winged primarily on warm stretches of equatorial currents, on the hunt. If the gulls were out in number, the certainty was a grand catch was in the making. Fishers threw out surplus morsels for the gulls to swoop in and devour, utilizing razor-beaks that could snap through bone, through cartilage, meat, organs. This one was unlucky. He’d over-dined on plate-shrimp and fell into a digestive stupor. Awaking from his fugue, the flock had cast out on without his company. Now he needed to catch up and eat in the meanwhile.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It had a meat-scent, strongly salty with tinted blood and organ discharge. Off somewhere north and a little west, its instinct told. The gull didn’t know the why or how of it; primordial ‘second voices’ spoke and directed, he followed with obedience. They knew. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He found food an hour’s flight later. The gull floated high on a convex spiral of air heating up from a cozied atoll sixteen clicks from Fadapo Isle. Indadh runners titled it the ‘Eel’s Coil’, subsequently warning to keep an eye when dipping into one of the closed pools. It was one of a million local slices of picturesque pacific vistas: gold sand lashed with broad canopies of viridian glass-palms and auburn straw, festooned with jagged collections of upright obsidian and pumice washed from the volcanoes south. It was lost on the gull. He banked on wings a meter and half-more long, laced with flight scales blinking silver under noon light, following the scent stream. On the north-most shore facing the cooler Jayda Seas was a strung hammock, an opened wroshyr-wood chest nestled beneath… and a half eaten ruby-salmon.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The gull bolted. The man in the hammock cocked his eyes up; gull scale-wings issued a long whistle-hiss harkening their banzai approach. It dropped like a bullet, arched bare centimeters up from the sand, gusting gritty plumes in its draft-wake, before cocking its wide bill-maw open. It swallowed up the leftovers, bones, meat, and scrisha sauce all. The man didn’t duck; the gull cavorted over his hammock and soared up high, becoming lost in the sun glare. Seroth Ur-Rahn smiled, slightly, and turned back to his leather and skin bound journal. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was a young man who’d lost youth’s edge from the lines in his face and body. Straight mops and bangs of sandy-brunette locks curtained sea-grey eyes. The boy had grown up with the same tall, wiry frame, sleek muscle compacted into hardened collections across his arms, legs, back and torso. Sheens of spent sweat dried as he relaxed. His vibro-longsword sat up stuck in the tree, burned through. Above him perched an axe and sheathe-knife buried in soft palm-wood, both needing to see a whetstone. Seroth’s trade was something between a warrior and monk: he ventured, asked around for troublesome beasts or monsters, and then went about solving their grief. For a fee. Always adhering to a stark code he’d fashioned for himself based on morality. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Least, what he believed constituted one. Seroth rubbed at short, knotted scars over his stomach. Thinking. Certain… encounters… a year and change prior had beggared questions. He tried drowning out doubt with practice drills, training, always travelling, on the prowl for work that demanded his sword. Not mercenary tasks, though. Something could not settle right in his heart when he considered the vocation of soldiering for coin. That hadn’t changed from his youthful outset. What had altered was the prior iron-clad logic distinguishing the evils from good. A woman named Guenyvhar Gunn taught him through his self-deception:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Absolute villains existed only in fiction, myth, and personal bias.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…She met her end on a plateau high over a Contruum arboreal forest, fighting a locked battle with her son. Overhead stared the unkind glare of the Fang, wind whipping off icy bristles and beards of snow. Guen died with an axe through her heart. She had tried to save something before cold and blood choked her and all recognition faded to empty glass in her eyes. Truth be told… Seroth hadn’t known what to say either.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad blinked salt from his eyes, turning another page over. That bleak year watched him sojourn over Tattooine deserts, inflicted with harsh training regiments aimed to either kill him or better him. That he survived to currently enjoy a soft lap of sugar-water on his tongue said much. He recalled to himself idly all the details of meeting Guenyvhar and her warband, the Sayda, beginning with work on Saijo. Meeting amoral, bloodthirsty Stenwulf. Beaten, tortured, offered up a chance for either membership or death; all on Guen’s terms. Without choice he accepted and was subsequently shoved under the nose of the Outer Rim’s most cantankerous son of a queen to ever live.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth wiped sand from his eyelashes and recalled the memory of Shev Rayner. Long in his face and so beaten by sun and harsh climes, his skin was nigh-on leather. Dark hair and darker eyes, and he looked too old to pick up at twigs let alone a warclub. He proved expectation wrong. Shev broke Seroth under his attention, then proceeded to build him into a personalized image. Into a tall frame with belying strength, eyes bright, attentive to detail, hands a blur, and a surefire will to slay. …Then Stenwulf put his sword through Shev’s spine and left him to die.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nearby, on a frond for purchase, paired lime-birds trilled a long, warbling song note. Seroth looked up; sunlight beat into his face, to help his expression look less curiously dark. The journal in his hand flipped another page over, with scrawled, messy hand-writing punctuated with spilled ink, dirt, and food stains. Shev Rayner was gone. Guenyvhar too, and Seroth had the satisfaction of know Stenwulf, damn his eyes, was rotting in whatever cruel pit Contruum authorities threw him in to languish. As a parting inheritance, Shev left him an ancient travelling case. His last words bragged hauling it from one fighting local to the other though he’d forgotten for just how long. It was an accumulated cache: no-nonsense journals written with his particular idioms, about wilderness survival, crude weapons forging, collected diagrams from where he didn’t wish to say, and just long memories scrawled out so someone else would come remember.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Things got fethed out there fer ya, didn’t they? Seemed always hurtin’ in yer heart, when ya came home. Musta did some wrong, that ya weren’t happy wit’. Ya gotta make peace that ya made mistakes, boy. Make peace wit’ it, move on. Accept wha’ever responsibilities ya have to. Yer man enough for it, I’ll bet that.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shhh, Shev…” Seroth murmured to himself, and kept reading.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The volume was a blow-by-blow account of something Shev called the ‘Midvinter Expedition’. Some sixty, no, seventy odd years prior he’d helped provide overwatch for a party looking to uncover a locale. The only reference so far were vague mentions of the ‘Cairn of Blades’, odd references to the familial warband, ‘Sayda’, ultimately coalescing to a lost pathway. ‘The Road to Ys’, Shev kept remarking. They survived cold, hostile marauders, and strange beasts that had ‘awoken’ to delay their progress. One professor, who seemingly disappeared when a white-squall of killing wind and snow sucked him into the night, seemed particularly obsessed. Shev had scrawled a few haggard insults about his character. Madness, it seemed. Desperate to find, or meet, ‘the Lodge of Shade.’ Amidst the furious marks of slanted print, the old Taskmaster’s episode on Midvinter proved just a prologue. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The journal was thickly bound; hide-skin on hard-cover, with yellowed, greasy pages dog-eared, dipped in annotated remarks. Seroth never figured Shev one for literacy. It panged him for a moment. The second father he wished to have known better, even if by a mote. That rare quality of friend; courage to take up arms in your name, for your sake, though Shev Rayner owed Seroth nothing of his time nor loyalty. He’d been imperfect. Perhaps Nat Gunn, long dead progenitor, hadn’t been the best quality of man. It came down to the boiling thought always picking at the lad’s conscience:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Did he act the way a good man was supposed to? What was the composition of his heart? Selflessness, nobility, morality, fine qualities, strictures to subscribe. …But Guen argued for the mercy in ugly executions. Wore a noble streak of pride for adopting impregnable self-justification. Morality was simply one of a million curtains of perception to look at any given moment, and she never doubted the value of coin over the cheapness of the conscience. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Did it all come down to simple self-reasoning? Giving himself placating reassurances, that he was not slipping into the same mire of grey mores? Guen never doubted her rightness. Seroth found he could do little else but doubt. Did he try acting according to what appealed to him or, alternatively, was it an influence of outside concepts? There was always influence… Jorus Merrill once told him that there hadn’t been an original thought since the days of the Kree. Was Seroth trying for good because it was an individual stressing, or because he didn’t want to stand under damning stares, facing acute justice? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It’d plagued him at Cato Neimoidia. It plagued him under Shev Rayner’s winged tutelage. It rose with its ugliest specter at Contruum. Now, the ghost of doubts past haunted from shadow and star, asking over and over: ‘What makes you believe you’re the better man?’[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But I’m not, I – “ Seroth murmured to himself, aloud.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~Ping-Beep-Ping-Beep!~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~Ping-Deep-Ping-Deep!~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad hauled himself off the rope hammock, to nudge his feet through baked sand and scoured clam-shells. Digi-electric whines, coupled with hard dulcet rings, were issuing from a displaced trouser pocket. He had laid his clothes aside for his exercises, just a preference for uncoupled motion bothered only by sun and mounting sweat. Seroth knelt into a bank of toughened shrubbery. Calloused hands unfolded a black, salt licked set of work trousers mended thrice over with fishing wire and cloth patches, pockets lightly bulged with herb packets and the odds and ends of his trade. He reached and began extricating a small, silver dial about the size of his palm. He cued its micro-power pack from idle to full, grumbling. There was a glad reason he preferred writing to [member="Rosa Mazhar"] rather than tempting bad luck with these damnable – [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Akure Executive Leatherworks & Associated Goods flashed a broad holo-label resplendent with a harshly angled, stylized beast-maw. Seroth wasn’t an employee. Not per se. But Rave Merrill preferred his more modest rates compared elsewhere against prices that measured ego, not results. The woman demanded results. It was a holo-missive, written down in curt styling and probably by a secretary. They’d never spoken personally, not to the lad’s memory. Seroth sat back against a palm tree shade and reviewed the potential work:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt][AEL By R. Merrill~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Kyriaki System[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Kyrikal 17[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]629 – 0057 Oshawa Avenue / JE7 AV9 / Grindslate City[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]`From the Desk of R. Merrill`[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Subject: Contracted Work[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]To Whom It May Concern[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]~Recent communiqués transmitted between Wild Space and Dromund System. Initially spotty. Despite virtual ‘glassing’ of the world by severe orbital bombardment, Kaas City purportedly still inhabited. So-called ‘Last Battalion of Kaas’. Digging in. Reports of decreasing temperatures. Snows, wind storms. Readings are beginning to border arctic frigidity. Evidence of impending ice age.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~Contacted by battalion commandant. Reports of killings, missing persons, amongst soldier and prominently amongst displaced citizenry. Sent several holo-liths, detailing sightings. Evidence incontrovertible: outbreak of Sithspawn, possibly other related bestial aggressors. Requesting aid in exchange for credit voucher and usage of recovered hides. We recommended you, by name. Arrival is expected, assumed. Payment in the usual amount, pending bonus on thoroughness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]End*][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Work. Seroth rose and pocketed the holo-dial back into the trouser pocket. He hauled his clothing and beaten leather harnessing over to the waiting hammock, retrieving stacked items of kit from off the tops of flattened pumice-stones. The sword, the durasteel tomahawk and longknife, sets of throaty tossing-blades and a length of trapping chain. He dressed in swift ritual; he needed motion which came from comfort, unwilling to shoulder off-fitting buckles and leather-strips that might limit his range of movement, reaction. When he stood, it was in the guise of a haggard man framed in weather-hardened weapon holsters, buckled on waist pouches with another set strapped around the meat of his thigh, a longsword behind his right shoulder crook with the axe and knife clasped firmly on mag-locks situated across his hips.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He retrieved old Shev Rayner’s codex-diary, hunching down to replace it back amidst the dirtied and unorganized trunk clutched thickly with similar tomes. The trunk lashed closed on a turadium seal; there were sounds of delicate mechanics, inner mechanisms snapping together to form a trap to thwart robbers. It depended upon old fashioned gear and virtual clockwork to open, something of a rarity compared to more dazzling and technically formidable digital and biometric safeties. He hauled the casket by its old, rusting grips towards a spot some meters from the lagoon shoreline. It was buried without ceremony, marked by a small fixture of old volcanic glass shards stuck upright, gleaming sharp.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth flexed his fingers around a length of flexi-steel wire; attached, dangling, rested a small durasteel key bobbing against the underside of his fist. Away, at the true shoreline facing the cold Jayda Seas, trusted Iron Snake sat in waiting berth. The lad liked thinking it woke up in some inexplicable way every time he approached. Purpose made his foot-falls run and flow a little faster, lighter. Having work meant he could worry about self-debates about personal goodness when dust subsided and monsters were dead. Seroth strolled up to the tongue-ramp swung out of the hull-neck behind the prow mounted cockpit. Distantly, a north storm was beginning to growl awake. Lightning flashed with incandescent arcs in the lad’s grey eyes, lighting up tracts of vaulting ocean brine. The answer of thunder became drowned as the Iron Snake’s stern engine-clusters began to cycle on…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Outer Rim Territories~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Former Imperial Territories~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Dromund System~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Dromund Kaas~[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt][Three Days Later…][/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Dromund Kaas lay in sulky berth, bruised and hazed by white-on-thunderous black weather systems wreathing it from axial point to axial point. Once a Republic Intelligence officer stole Seroth to the side, midst the hectic preparations for what would become the ‘Neimoidian Pacification’, and showed him a holo-lith. Dromund Kaas: Imperial Capital. Perhaps the most vaunted Fortress World ever conceived and strengthened under the much-hallowed reigns of Apparatus, Moridin, and Varanin. Ringed with crowns of warships at full orbital drydock and hemmed by picket-lines of patrol starfighter-squads. Enough small worships to lend a fog of durasteel and turadium. Ion-engines glowing like Hell’s summon of fireflies.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked on her now, for the first time. He thought once that, if all went to pot, he and a thousand other Padawans would be dragged by their hair to kneel at the feet of the Empress. They all had the dire dream of smoking ruin… of failure. The lad thought he would only come to the Dromund System when war was truly pitched; he banked the Iron Snake to starboard as a sooty, gutted hull floated pitifully past the prow. There were no warships now, or hive-like patterns of glistening void-fighters. Seroth gently pressed his beloved Iron Snake onward through bright debris fields of slagged dreadnoughts.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was typical of eclectic Mandalorian handwork, whose combat principals remained mercurial at best, between wielding the scalpel and the war hammer. Subjugation fleets came to Dromund Kaas as word went and proceeded to pulp the world in vindictive barrages that blitzed every city and ground-side settlement into glassed craters. Soldier, civilian, Sensitive’s, warlords with their underlings perished, burnt to ash, afterward even such desolate remains were hammered into scattered atoms. Fortifications and strongholds built to last from the ages of the Galactic Cold War and more older fell in on themselves, hellfire raining relentlessly as the Mandalorians disgorged further horrors. Seroth could see them overlaid on a topographical AR overlay: twenty five asteroid bodies impacted across all major continents and water bodies. Like warped bony contusions poking up from a desiccated body. The Mandalorians killed and killed over, over, and over again. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’Fiery the Angels rose’,” The lad whispered to himself, adjusting the yoke. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Comm. channels echoed background white-noise and hissed electronic breaths of static. None challenged the Iron Snake on approach, as it burned forward through bars and banks of littering vessel hulks. Seroth could see names, still paint-etched onto loosely connected plating: ‘The Reaper’s Due’, ‘Order of Slaughter’, ‘The Resilience’, ‘Thorn Sepulcher’, ‘Day of Hord’. Flash-fried bones scattered off transparisteel viewports. The Snake flew on and began ghosting through the upper thermosphere. Consulting readouts hinted at gradual warming, though the lad knew minus thirty degrees centigrade was not much better on the body than absolute zero Kelvin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Scattered aurorae began haunting the descent; long trails of creeping lights fading like striations of blood into space. Seroth glanced to hull-mounted micro-cameras, watching as frost began to etch and thicken upon the vessel’s fixed wings. Something creaked at stern. Again, pressure buffeted the raised tail-vectors, telling the lad to adjust the descent by a few sub-degrees. Outside, raised columns of stark, chalky cumulonimbus and nacreous clouds stood almost stalk still. Coursing stratospheric winds blasted them like water across bare rock, pushing chuffs of airy matter to and fro. Snowflakes spattered across the viewports. Seroth looked again at temperature read outs and reminded himself to dress with under-layers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Visibility above Dromund Kaas was a nightmarish fugue; high winds lancing walls of cascading snow and ice particles breathed hoarsely across the Iron Snake. Above and below was white hell. The ship responded only to infrared topography overlaid as Augmented Realty on the viewports, careful to slow, bank port, easing through a rugged set of capped peaks edging on a grey sea. Waves tossed high, too high, too frothy, with chunked icebergs grounding themselves against shoreline sandbars. The water line was far higher than Seroth anticipated. ‘Shoreline’ lapped against standing sinyu-trees caked with ash and burnt to full petrifaction. Then he saw it: the risen crags of vessel buttresses, laid in silvery contrast against titanic, black and downed asteroids hunkered against the ocean floor. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was worse than the losses of Rhommamool and Osarian. Total planetary vaporization left only dust motes on the solar wind to mourn, like scattered crematoria ash. Dromund Kaas was a broken whore’s body left to die behind a collection-dumpster: brutal, tragic, not the least heartbreaking. Seroth panned an anterior hull-cam closer at a detail he’d spotted upon a small, ashy lagoon midst the waters. Empty, grinning skulls, bleached of flesh, watched the Iron Snake passively, cracked and boring up dark stares to the sky.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The skyline of Kaas City loomed ahead. Thin sunlight broke over the northern hinterlands and sloped mountains to lend brief definition; the remains of Captain Larraq’s cool contempt, the Bastard of Sundari, who would be remembered for butchering the world. Seroth roamed Iron Snake west along the city’s outlying territories, sensors set to maximum-gain, feeding layer upon layer into the astro-terrestrial navigation reader. Despite gentle light, the range of visual sight was still little better than a rough fifteen meters in a given direction. The Snake paused, idling on downdraft ramjets. Her pilot busied himself swiftly cross-referencing, overlaying, and updating top-down acoustic, laser, and multi-spectrum light, matter, and radiation readouts. Jorus Merrill had been kind enough to loan something of his own collection of related charts. Accordingly, Kaas City was a bustling, darkly gothic and art-deco metropolis, with soaring architecture planted to illustrate visual metaphors of power, hierarchy, and privilege. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth banked the Snake lightly to starboard and peered out.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a graveyard. Capital-ship grade ordinance reduced any buildings standing over such-and-such a height to total ruin. Skyscrapers had fallen across entire districts, some had imploded, collapsing in on themselves to form messy piles of fire-glossed stanchions, support girders. Tons upon millions of tons constituting garbage and visible carnage lay festooned under rising layers of snow. Temperature readouts built maps of heat sinks; underground fires still raging from ruptured waste and gas piping running through Kaas City’s underground. The presence of still scattered debris particles laced with the snowfall helped fog out further readings. Supposedly, millions inhabited the fortress-metropolis; the Snake cruised over a causeway littered with frozen dead, suffocated or killed by heat-splashes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad checked the AEL communiqué. The Last Battalion had established out-system communications with Kyrikal. Somehow. Desperation, necessity no doubt. The communiqué briefed the rendezvous was to take place in what remained of ‘Gargant Hall’, a formerly beloved mustering point for several local platoons built from Kaas City natives and town volunteers. Seroth checked ‘Gargant’ against a long readout listing a hundred thousand and more street names, addresses, commercial, industry, and military facilities prior to the Scouring. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Gargant Recruitment Center…” Seroth murmured. He grasped the control yokes and woke the Snake from its cold stupor idling over several sacked trunk roads. The prow nudged forward and gusted over a fire-emptied hab-stack.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They were ranging over a port landscape, with landing pads slowly bearding with hoarfrost, when Seroth heard the comm. array wake up. Steady harrows of hissing static-sound came on live from an unknown broadcast channel. He set the Snake into a standby patrol loop over a brooding avenue lined with shattered, bronze casted statues, and began searching for the ghost transmission. The channel was gurgling with sucking bursts of discarded audio. Attempts at cleaning up to hear for vocals proved wasted after five minutes; a busted antenna array, perhaps leftovers from city-wide messaging calling for mass evacuations. Seroth was about to cue the comm. off when, quite unexpectedly, off-sound cleared and a clear audio-stream established.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Hello?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a narrow voice. A little clogged, nasally maybe, and shaking. Seroth hesitated then flicked a console bud.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Hello, is someone receiving?” They asked again, hushed. There was a metallic echo ringing off in the background. “Please… Please, respond, anyone…? Please… This is transmitting on all local emergency channels… Oh Gods, please, someone pick up…! …Haah!” They muffed their shriek and made indicating sounds of heat-gowns rustling against the floor. Had that been a roar?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“This is Seroth aboard Winter Eagle Iron Snake, responding – “ The lad replied.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“H-Hello! Oh…! Oh thank – Hello, are you there??” A reply cut in sharply, not the least bit tinged with a mounting horror in the back of whomever’s throat was broadcasting.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m right here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohh Gods…” They sobbed. “Oh Gods… This… This is maintenance overseer Lidh! At… Feth this cold…! At… Slahtiz Port & Freebay! It’s… We took… We took over the… The terminals, when the Enemy came and started… Started killing all of us. It’s a refugee zone, alright?? Look! We’re in trouble!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth recalled the AEL brief, sifting through the instructed details: “Reports of killings, missing persons, amongst soldier and prominently amongst displaced citizenry. Sent several holo-liths, detailing sightings. Evidence incontrovertible: outbreak of Sithspawn – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ma’am, tell me what’s happening.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You have to…” She paused, trying mightily to stifle a coarse frog in her throat. “You have to relay this – to Master Boudica, at Kaile Ward, at Gargant Hall! We need help!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I will,” Seroth promised gently. Then the audio feed went silent. Off-setting background warbles of throaty, meaty vocal undulations sounded, ending in a wet scream of air. “Ma’am??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No no no no no – “ Was the eventual pick up on the mic. “Oh Gods, how did it get here?? Listen, whoever you are, I do not have much time! When… When everything was burning… We fled here, to the port – to the terminals! It’s… It’s been a sort of… home, until the fires go out in the underlevels… But… But just three days ago, some… things… have broken their way in! They’re… They’re monsters, they started killing and slaughtering anyone they found, we… We all ran… We’re hid all over the place, but… But most are in the drydock bays… Oh Gods, what are they – Aaaauuugghh!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad leaned almost cheek-down against the seat-console, fiddling wildly to capture the dissonant cacophony erupting on the other channel-end. Plasteel gave under a handful of crunching blows; he could hear the shattered panes plinking sharply off dull tiling and skids of sheer ice. The woman was echoing crying please between blubbering lips. Something was coming in… Stepping over rubble and office detritus. There was a heel-stomp collapsing what must have been a strewn monitor frame. The woman’s horror increased into nonsensical strings of prayer and defiant cursing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Suddenly, whatever had caved its way in drew up a breath and began roaring. An auditory sensation that could only be described between the death howl of a dying sun and something wrenched up from the woman’s worst fears. It cascaded over her own scream and drew closer with the bass thumps of thick-set heels and toes smashing into the ground. It only ended when there was a slather of hot breath, one final, terrified gasp… and then the sound of bone-on-bone being crunched, highlighted with wet geysers of pressured blood erupting to hose down the unseen mic.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth slapped the console and deadened the comm. channel. The Iron Snake had spent the moments trying to reference the signal source against the multitude of metal and ferrocrete ‘mountains’ otherwise strangling the narrow feed. An AR radar blipped up on a holo-field by Seroth’s arm chair. He snarled, punching engine output to full throttle, gunning for Slahtiz Port. The rendezvous would wait.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Slahtiz Port~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Some profound luck spared Slahtiz Port from the fate surrounding it. To the west, two slabs of discoloured asteroid stone had fell upright into the ground, disintegrating industrial parks and assembly zones into motley flatlands. Below ground factory space was still burning, still streaming steam vents that melted and pooled surrounding ice and snow into bracken rivers coursing down through rents in the cratered levels. South, by less than five hundred meters, the Mandalorians brought down a pitted war-ship. Torque, gravity, and sustained cannon blasts had torn off its nose-prow, now laying twisted into the outside parking lanes. Hoarfrost clogged and hung off the silent gunnery-barrels spiking along heat-blackened duraplast armour. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Iron Snake drew in close and landed before Terminal A. It was a flat iron-top, pentagonal and grossly enlarged, with outer support-columns of set frida-stone struck by mason hammers to resemble cowled, brooding death-figures. Hollow rock, bleak eyes watched the vessel discharge a small exit ramp. Seroth stepped out into the wind and inclement arctic patterns and drew up his cloak closer. It was Mandalorian Fall Out. Ceaseless orbital assaults cracked the face of Dromund Kaas, smashing all examples of terrestrial architecture into the same warped plains of half-cooked dirt, blasted and braised glass. Several quintillion tons of mica-dust and soot particles clogged the biosphere. Dromund Kaas was going to freeze, and stay frozen for a goodly while. The age of ancestral mangroves and endless swamplands was finished, buried below encroaching ice. Now was the time of the resurgent glacier, of the Winter in Revenge, what the Mando’a believed was correct retribution. Seroth checked his heat gown, making sure his harnesses were buckled closely, his sword, axe, and knife resting in wait for his sure hands. He walked through a graveyard of empty speeders towards the central terminal entrance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Most windows looking out into the air-car lot had blown in from some incredible force. Terminal A’s lobby foyer tile-floor was littered with a sea of blinkered glass shards, each coated in dew-frost. Grey light streaming down from punctured holes in the upper ceiling and floors cast strange, idle rainbows of colour off of broken prisms. The lad’s boots crunched down and echoed as loud as gunfire. Seroth checked the clasps holding his bracers and attending hidden blades, listening. Crisp air held just an eerie, quiet ambience. The chuffs of his boots pressing against the floor whispered like sand-paper on steel. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Terminal A’s architectural overseer possessed an undeniable eye for dark art-deco, caught up in imperial and black age fancies. Ratty posters, swinging beside mauled insignia banners, swayed from the rows of engaged columns set back against the far walling. Arches resplendent with obsidian keystones curled up between the scores if not hundreds of support pylons holding up the even twelve floors ascending high into a titanic skylight. Only the steel pane-frames remained. Snow fell through in quickening down drafts, piling flurries onto an increasingly buried sculpture. Seroth treaded carefully forward, flickering looks to the myriad, inky shadows. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The features of the bronze and marble carved statue were obscured with white. Simply, that it was tall, over three meters, and featured idealized, romantic touches harkening back to the post-Palpatine renaissance enjoyed by New Republic worlds. It was a womanly figure, with a harsh brow glossed over with melted ice warming and then cooling into a disfiguring facial mask. Spits of blaster fire pocked into the bronze belly-plating. The lad wiped his cuff over a long memorial plaque and read over the dedication: ‘Sith’ari Ascendant: Memory of the Empress.’[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A thousand conflicting sentiments broiled behind the lightning darts in his grey eyes. Bitter or not, contrary or not, opinion didn’t change how history had ploughed along. Somewhere, Ashin Varanin was seeing to her life’s work, deep in her cups with the best bastards she could find. History, their historians, and hubristic after-sight would be the ones to make judgment. Not a simple monster hunter freezing in the cold. Seroth bowed, left the fragmentary memorial behind and began skirting north-easterly, looking out for signs of refugee inhabitation. Terminal A seemed to be wholly abandoned, at the least simply left be. Seroth mounted up the stairwells connected the dozen floors vertically; turbo-lifts and powered escalators were dead in their repulsor-tracts. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cold, still bodies waited for him where they lay, leaned against corners and portions of alternating support not chipped in snowfall. Seroth looked into one person: their features were bitten off by the cold, skin turned pale yellow and allow, withdrawn into a weeping cradle against their waist and ribs. Another was flung over several safety-rails. Their back was seared open with exposed, partially heat-blow ribs and hipbones. Seroth toed a discarded blaster rifle gently aside. There were further cadavers sprawled out in pained scenes, each dressed up in scavenged coats, heat gowns, and portions of repaired web-gear ordinarily worn by planetary defense forces. Bandits, Seroth surmised. Survivors already digging in for a short, hard existence dominated by pyrrhic raids and death. A great deal of death, as Terminal A looked to be a mausoleum for several locations of survivors turning on each other for sustenance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was venturing around east to take a northern concourse into Terminal C. At his right were scores of looted retailers with all erstwhile windows, holo-manikins, product displays clubbed aside or stolen outright. Hordes of abandoned suitcases lay in stuck piles along the upper walkways. Some were torn open and disgorged of clothing and pertaining hygiene kits: shirts, sweaters, gowns, razors, soap, shampoos. Looters didn’t bother with wallets or purses strewn under boot and foot. Seroth knelt low and picked up a small, rare polaroid pictograph, looking into two faces. A soldering mother with her little son raised up in the crook of one arm holding tightly onto a duffle bag. Suddenly, he could feel the weight of Rosa’s obsidian-ring charm hanging from its cord. Quietly, he folded the picture up, to store it in a belt pouch.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The concourse was silent. Forlorn outlines beside still figures sat where they fell. Seroth looked to the puncture-holes blown through the walling, steel, and insulation. Somehow a great, steel girder had fallen through to pierce the hall like a bolt through a septum. There was one curious detail, besides the obvious, frozen displays of ended carnage. Seroth walked along before feeling his boot suddenly stick and track in something. A blood-pool he thought turned into bracken, rusty ice was coldly sticky. Fresh enough to be still staving off the sub-zero climes. Seroth turned to find a prone corpse leaking out onto the floor. He knelt down to turn the cadaver over… and steeled his jaw.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He had been a youthful Shifala. Something had come along at an incredible pace to overpower and subdue him on the spot, savaging him with claws, talons… perhaps teeth and jaws. The Shifala was losing the majority of skin and meat over his throat and clavicle, ribs parted open with evidence of grinding molars wrenching the bone aside. His remains were missing his hearts, lungs, the belly had been left in a state that would make even the most haggard butcher gag. Seroth surmised the Shifala had perhaps been on a scavenge run for supplies not yet desecrated, coming back into Terminal C through the concourse when something found him. It’d been fast, blitzing the youth before he could react. A cold blaster pistol laid out of reach; checking its magazine-charge revealed that it hadn’t seen firing discharges. The Shifala died instantly. His throat hung at a crazed angle, exposes of cracked vertebrae and split spinal meat hinting at a crushed, broken neck. …Then the slayer hunkered down and ate him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a clutched ear-piece left in the Shifala’s palm. Scraps of vague static mixed with verbose sound echoed dryly in the cold air. Seroth lifted the comm. up and fed it into his ear, listening…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“-Kkrzzzzk!- door, lock the fe-kkrrzzaak!- closed, damn it!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re trying!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did Willan come back!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If he’s not back by now…!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shut up over there! Don’t say that! Where are the rifles!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know, look!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where’d Giba get off to!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She ran upstairs to try the receivers again! She wanted to get off a broadcast, feth knows no one’s listening!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh Gods… Please… Please, we can’t die here!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth, windows are giving! Fall back! Everyone fall ba – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a screaming rend of glass, steel, and concrete, hurrying footsteps stomping into underfoot snow, across panes of slick, tripping ice. Someone screamed; another cursed. Blaster rifles lit off, tracing shots into the walls, trying to follow targets that were moving devilishly fast. Further screaming… more cursing. Seroth wasn’t listening. He was already sprinting down the end of the concourse along a trail of recent carnage: bodies hung in collapsed piles over rails and floor edges, blood washing the walls in high arterial sprays. In his hands sparked the longsword. His speed broke him through a battered portion of weak railing and into empty space. Snow cascaded down into the Terminal C lobby from the wrecked skylight overhead and below: scurrying figures running for their lives before a small horde of black, broken shapes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh what the hell!?” A man cried out. He’d just watched something like a furious bolt hammer into one beast with three heads and six mouths between them, exploding into meat, blood, and broken blood. The vibrosword rose in the gore-mist, turned, vented on a bifurcating gleam of sonic-energy, and swung through the skull of another beast. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Someone behind the man grabbed him by the collar, hauling him on. “Never mind it! Run!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The beasts encircled the killing figure standing still in their midst. Each was a nightmarish composition of compiled features: bestial maws, hooked claws, digitigrade back-limbs, scales, fur, bone protruding from split skin, hunkered forward. Too small, too tall, fat, muscled, Each could scent it. It was sweat, overriding the lathers of blood on the air, indescribable to anyone who lacked the extra-sensory prowess their strange transformations had gifted. The killing figure was like them: cursed with the touch of primordial life-force. Chaos. But stronger! A tight ball of coruscating light! Eat! Feed! Kill! That’s all there was! Eat! Feed! Kill! [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The circle closed in. Seroth turned with them, blood scattering as he began the killing work, and roaring with a hoarse howl.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The creatures were the Devil’s children and so fought accordingly. Damnable speed blurred homunculus shapes in and out of the lad’s vision field, where he struck curtly. And curtly missed. Seroth whacked his sword through a shape that shivered out of sight before his eyes, burling into his backside. The lad was tossed and forced to halt his skid over ice and tile. Shadows of quick doom were swift to capitalize: talon-hands, blade-arms, and saw-tails wrenched ferrocrete and snow up from the flooring in a made killing scramble. Out of the dust and flying detritus Seroth rolled, coming to his feet with his blade cocked high by his cheek. Scratches and a handful of gouged lashes had torn out the cloth and hood of his back; there was itching from opened wounds, and slow warmth soaking into his belt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Glancing blows rained in. The lad was busy counting the bodies running about him in rough semi-circles, struggling to keep up his defense-work. Shev Rayner’s lessons hadn’t counted on as much swordplay as simply introducing more old-fashioned techniques; there were a half-dozen other disciplines to inform, before he could deem the lad fit for the field work demanded by his mother. Claws smacked off the raised blade-flat, but another lashed down, finding purchase in his arm and ripping. Seroth back-pedaled and ducked beneath a tail-swipe. Ice-sand was billowing all about their gnashing feet. An even six, he counted; three harrying from the fore, the others at his backside, each cruelly powerful. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One strode forward and slammed its limbs down. Open palms coupled to lanky fingers crunched into the flooring, exploding chips and slabs of broken granite-marble. It missed: it wanted to crush the man into and split him open, so they could all have at feasting on bone marrow and sinew. Seroth blurred through the budding mist; he side-stepped twice, left and left again, vibrosword meeting the hide of the beast’s hip. The lad cursed when his blade-edge found hide and refused to chop through, almost catching in the monster’s flesh. He powered through, arms briefly coursing with extra motives, forcing the blade on. Blood in a hot slicks burst from the monster like rotten pulp from a fruit as Seroth turned a full circle and struck again. His sword found the skin stretched achingly across its backbone, severing through upraised bone and spinal nerve-sheathes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The beast toppled forward, crippled and bleeding. It ceased struggling to crawl away for coverage and respite when a hammered stab took it through bulbous occipital bone and out an eye. Seroth flicked gore off his blade and turned to address the other five.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They paid no heed and even less remorse to what remained of their former and now fallen pack-member. The body cracked and broke under the onslaught stampede, slicking paws and claw-toes with underfoot blood wash. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One man and the singular monster pack fought their way back and forth across the foyer lobby of Terminal C. Seroth refused to let their numbers pin him to one spot and open him up for flanking tactics, now understanding the beasts possessed the sheer advantages in physical brawn and reflexive speed. Instinct operated in tandem, giving them belying ‘intelligence’ though only shattered madness played in the dead-light of their eyes. Seroth ran, rolling into a duck and rising, hacking neatly. The blow took a monster through its ribs, up into its throat and nape. Before blood had even discharged, the corpse was levered off his blade, hide again sticking against even the whisking vibro-sonic edge. Sithspawn hide was tough. Dangerously able to stand up against even vibro-tech. Seroth gripped his sheathe-knife and rammed the point up through the jaw and skull of another creature. It’s wide maw shut like a animal trap, bleeding ichor and brain-matter onto the lad’s wrist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now three versus the one. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their burl kept pushing and backed Seroth into the railing of a silent escalator. One dropped into a donkey kick, smashing feet-up into the lad’s face. Seroth tossed over the stairway with his body careening one way, his sword scattered another, landing upright with a fierce metallic twang. The beasts were on him, fang and claw and limbs crunching down into his backside and legs. One leaned in too close and wagged a mocking tongue in the youth’s cut, bruised face. Shev taught that folks always underestimated a good, nasty chomp. Seroth lunged and bit down over the appendage, tearing a half-inch chunk free in his jaw as the beast capered away, screaming. The offending flesh was spat away and his hands reached for knife and axe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With a cry, he shrugged and managed to displace the stinging weight off his body, lashing out even as he was coming to a knee. The durasteel bashed against thigh-flesh belonging to one of the monstrosities, hacking for purchase in four blistering hacks before it rent through the hide and femur. Seroth savaged the monster in turn, ripping axe-edge and blade through the matter constituting its face. He remembered the creature that had dislodged a portion of its tongue. It had run around behind, and was hopeful to take advantage of his blind spot. Quite suddenly it found its charge brought to a shivering halt; fingers clumsily slapped at the long-knife imbedded through the tender cartilage wrapped over an almost non-existent nose, its point just gently poking against the back of its oblong head. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth didn’t see it totter over. One more composite of simian features bred together with a hairless mixture of goat and bear remained. The axe in his hand twirled in an exercise-flourish: his left bracer slinked a long, hidden knife into his opened, waiting palm. Each circled the other and wordlessly sized up potential threat. The beast was a head taller, thicker in muscular volume, wielding bone-swords pinched through the skin on his forearms and knees. Seroth was just a tall man with a wiry musculature and shiny things in his hands, though said shiny implements dripped Sithspawn vitae.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It snorted, curling a pseudo-derisive expression over too-thin lips, and charged. Triumph seemed doubly assured: the lad wasn’t moving. He was just springing his arm back and looked very busy split-second calculating range, arc, and needed velocity. The axe flew forward, turning with uncanny grace, meeting with a hard crunch into the flesh between its collarbone and shoulder. It tripped on its approach as pain forced its plodding brawn to stutter, tripping. The mistake was to look aside and address the aberrant object lodged into its body. Seroth had hurled himself forward in a stark run and planted his foot to the beast’s falling knee, leaping high with hidden-blades drawn. They fell, plunging with a gory sink into the beast’s eyes. Busily they sought brain tissue. Seroth grunted and shunted his wrists down forward, harder! There was wet pop of breaking calcium… And then the beast lolled its jaw down, coughing out a sick disgorge of materials beyond description.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He leapt aside as it tumbled over onto its flank, wholly dead. Overhead from the scattered roof-window of Terminal C, snowfall continued hurtling down and pooling around his boot-toes. Seroth winced as he retrieved his vibrosword; he was winded and hurt, bloodied and scored with bruises beneath his field-clothing. AEL paid their high fees for Sithspawn for a damned good reason: they did not fall easily.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“H-Hey? H-Hey, buddy!?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned. Several sets of frightened eyes and brows covered in tuques were staring at him behind long desk-ails. One had trained their sport-gun on him. The barrel was shaky and the eyes behind the sights less than trusting. The lad promptly sheathed his tools, holding up his hands. Pausing, the Kaas City survivors surveyed the carnage languishing under christening snow. “Ohh… Oh-Ohh Gods…,” One of them sighed in cracked tones. “They’d have… They’d have killed us to a soul… Ate us all…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Quiet, Henner,” Said the one with the rifle. She licked at parched lips and gestured with her weapon. “Just quiet now. You, no… No sudden funny stuff, okay?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad nodded. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did you get them all? They’re dead?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He nodded again. The woman took care to lower her blaster away, though he noted she kept it lightly cocked at her hip in case something in his demeanor displeased her enough. Seroth let his arms fall and wiped blood off his mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We were watching it all…” One said, a thickset Toydarian hovering on wings. “Sujela said to keep running, but… Greer said there was someone… He said you fell on one of them and killed it and started killing more… I had to see.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah,” Sujela murmured. “Because what if he lost?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He didn’t,” Spoke up Henner.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And if he did and they looked up to find your dumbass lookin’ all agape? Feth, guys!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We know that!” Greer protested. “But when someone just falls like a bolt and starts laying in like that, it tends to go that they win.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sometimes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who are you?” Edged the Toydarian.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…My name is Seroth,” The lad said. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…And what is this one named Seroth doing here, exactly?” Said the Toydarian, still eying him. “Not that we are unappreciative – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“ – But you sort of came out of nowhere,” Sujela picked up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth thought briefly of how to keep an explanation succinct. “Do you know the Last Battalion? They contacted folk who contacted me, and asked me to come to Kaas City and kill monsters for them. That’s my work: I hunt and slay beasts that cause trouble.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Thank feth for that…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But how did you know we were in trouble?” Sujela pressed, before allowing her expression to grow awed. “…Did Giba…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He nodded. “I was flying for Gargant Hall when she raised me on comms.. She relayed your plight but couldn’t make an escape in time herself. I landed outside and ventured in to look for survivors, see if there wasn’t something I could do.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As a monster killer.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sujela cocked a look. “And if you just found us all dead getting eaten?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then there would have been vengeance.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…For strangers you’ve never met?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye,” Seroth nodded gently.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Strange one you are, Mister Seroth,” said Henner. He kept up an anxious lookout, having fitting his fist with a long pistol. “Suj…? What about the folks at the hangers…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The woman grimaced. “No. No word.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hangers?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah, out at Terminal B. That’s where the majority of us have tried settling in, displacement camps, refugee housing. You know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked between the varied looks of aching worry. Eventually, Henner piped up. “…It was the camp that raised us over commlink. They were the ones telling we were under attack by these… these bastards. Sujela here, she… She figures the camp could only know if they were under heat themselves. Which means… Which means they’re… Probably under… Under siege… Maybe…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Or getting torn apart.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Greer!” Sujela snarled. She looked up at the hunter. “…You say this is what you do for a living?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. …And yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Thank you,” She murmured. “If you follow the concourse going west upstairs, it’ll take you to Terminal B. Just… follow what signs you can, and you’ll make it to the tarmac and the hangers outside. If the camp’s in trouble, that might mean more numbers than what you dealt with here…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth frowned, but fixed on a belt-loop and shrugged a heavy crack out of his shoulders. “Do you have somewhere to hold up here?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We can make do,” Said the Toydarian.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad nodded and fixed on a tattered length of hood-cowling over his brow, sauntering upstairs. Sujela and her cold brood observed his boots tracking blood atop the escalator teeth, murmuring amongst themselves and carefully toeing through the eight prone bodies leaking rotten organs onto the tiling…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]His palms dampened from anticipation inside his gloves, holding on to his unsheathed longsword while traversing up into the dead-light vaults of Terminal C. Outside beyond Slahtiz port, time was slowly beginning to darken over the south-eastern skies. Grey light was gradating into long, inky spirals of smoky shadow, pitting every unlit corner with ichor-blackness, where grinning teeth and daemonic eyes glowed with unnatural perturbance. Seroth had to reach the East-West concourse and Terminal B beyond. It was a twelve floor climb up through the foyer levels, delayed time and again by damages wrought on the shared flooring and ceilings. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every step was arrested by shadows roiling with unformed shape, before vomiting some obscenity at the boy, bellowing. They laid in waiting ambush behind stretches of Sith-styled arcades along the foyer galleries. Outlines of physical horror, they came bursting from behind shop window-cages, down from wrenched holes in the upper ceilings, armed with limbs contorted into bone-swords and knuckle-daggers, sensing the lad’s coming steps. He was a hot wash of meaty heat and riots of scent to their nostrils. Half-chewed and discarded corpses were evidence enough of attempted feeding: frozen bones and dried out skin puckered with teeth-marks, tasteless, useless to their palettes. Not Seroth, though. He was not of the dead. His flesh would be terribly warm and his blood would quench the black thirst gnawing inextricably at their throats and bellies. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]If they could kill him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Below on ground levels, Sejula herded her small team back into a shielded set of examination compartments. Heavy duraplast doors shielded twice again with in-laid alloys were locked and set resiliently against their frame-jambs, though they could still hear tremulous scream-howls from up above. So often, a body came teetering over to slam neck-down into the flooring. It would be gross, hairless across its epidermis, thick hide savaged with brutal lines issuing blood and organs onto the floor in slowly freezing puddles. On the twelfth floor, before the concourse tunnel and Terminal C beyond, the lad was hard pressed. Air steamed with heat contorting off the now-glowing edge of his vibrosword. He’d set its cutting power to absolute maximum, harried time and again by monsters launching at him with opened jaws. The battery was guzzling heartily, until the edge of conducting alloy was just a haze of molten-gold. Creatures of impossible descript were left bleeding and dying in his wake. Seroth parried a limb-blow at his throat, stepped out and pirouette-stabbed up through the ribs and heart of another creation. Another came loping from the concourse doors on four limbs ending in bone-clubs, looping atonal clamours from behind buck-teeth. Seroth ducked out of its path, to sting its sides with a five-cut lashing, its hide resisting the vibro-cut. The lad was wagering even plasma-weaponry would be given strict contests to try and find the weak-points in their alchemized flesh, feeling his blade beginning to imperceptibly chip on their bones.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He reached the umbilical corridor allowing connection to the third terminal: a fallen Galaxy-class TIE bomber had careened and performed a perfect arc into the long hall, effecting a solid wedge of durasteel, turdarium, broken s-foils, and a crumpled canopy peaked with frozen blood glittering like rubies. Nearby, the cabin ordinance crew dragged themselves out to die amidst the ice and flocking snow. Seroth cursed, looking about for a way to egress past. Winds were howling in from the north, casting over the blunt architectural edging outside. Atop the broken starfighter, wounds in the steel, concrete, and insulation allowed failing light to shine over the lad’s brow. Checking twice and then twice again for anything idling in the snow-drifts, Seroth checked his harnesses, the heat-gown beneath, and fastened his cowl down tight. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He clambered aboard a cock-eyed port wing sticking high over, crazed solar-panels cracked and growing bulbous with hoarfrost. Every second step was a test to feel or hear the delicately stuck vessel respond to his weight. There was no telling the true distance between the concourse and the tarmac-grounds outside, save that it was set on the Terminal’s twelfth floor: enough to break a limb and neck on falling impact. Just before his reach grew close to gripping onto a set of twisted rebar overhead, screeches of durasteel grinding on itself reached Seroth’s ears. He stilled, cursing, waiting though his body was coiled in. The grinding harrow ringing deafly up at him didn’t quiet; his footing on a portion of back-quarter engine was starting to tip inward. Seroth ceased waiting, listening. He blurred in a bolting shot upwards for the torn roofing. His fingers gripping into the stuck metal-ribbing protruding from pulverized insulation and concrete, his feet swung out in empty space. Below, the fighter gave out a last metallic groan before it fell out of the concourse.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a whoop of displaced air; long echoes of contorting starfighter frame-work before a gut-wrenching collision into snow-layered pavement. A rumble: still unfrozen engine propellant went up in a rose of white-fire and sooty smoke. Seroth climbed atop the concourse’s outer hulling as dark fumes gusted around him. Outside was a featureless wasteland of freezing swampland dying to the overcoming fury of the oncoming ice age, one unending blur of snow-on-frost, until the horizon was just a caked blur spinning with vertigo-inducing snow and wind patterns. The cold began to stab at the rips tore into his protective heat-vesting. Seroth felt his bones beginning to crackle, blood aching. On he strode, boots crunching through accumulating ice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead rose Terminal C, now just a haggard shadow looming like an obtuse skull. Brutalism and Gothicism mixing with bleak perfection to instill a memory of dark regality in every building line. The lad was trudging on against the cold, the wind that brought it, cleats biting into ice and steel sheets beneath. Somewhere, west he thought, were the jagged teeth of Kaas City. Its skyline was still apparent even as sunfall began robbing its standing ruins of visual definition. Seroth reached into his belt-pack, flicking on a torchlight he fixed to a headband and wrapped around his temples. Terminal C was still dark: power-grids feeding electricity into its manifold lights were probably just an off-line memory. Winds brought down a wail of ice-chunks that nearly collided the lad off his footing. He hurried on, remembering the tired, empty alarm playing out in Sujela’s eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sometimes, when upper atmospheric winds collided enough winging shards of micro-ice particles together, there was a grand spark of electro-pulse. Get enough crystal motes to press, smashing in together, a rare bolt of radiant lightning cascaded and harrowed the skies with ungodly illumination. White-on-blue discs of illumination briefly sundered the lad’s vision; he blinked, trying to peer up again, a trio of snow-storm thunderbolts wrenching into Terminal C’s upper communication spires. Showers of sheeting sparks briefly glowed like pyreflies, cooling instantly. The lightning bought a split-second curtain of illumination for miles about. Hooded, massively rock-hewn figures of mammoth proportion, set below the upper roof-lip, scowled mercilessly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a shape ahead. Not atop the concourse but leaning over a distant, jutting balcony. Seroth could see it in the three-second split of lightning glow foiling the winter quail. Illumination was brief, but enough to provide visual details. They were tall, it seemed, maybe six feet and change in inches, gathering a long, segmented cloak of some grey material that looked between plastic-armour and some model of physical, electronic shielding. There was no ‘face’: a long, muzzling box-mask of severe lines mounted with unblinking camera-eyes constituted its skull. Seroth thought he saw hints of durasteel and further plastic-metal alloys and alkaline framework attached to the body before the snows swung in and robbed a second glance. He shook his head, reached to unsheathe his vibro longsword and flicked on its killing hum.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Entry was gaining into Terminal C by a smashed out window several body-lengths away on the building side-piece. Seroth climbed out, and then swung in and found his footing, surging into a run. Sujela mentioned the rest of Slahtiz Port’s resident refugees and failed evacuators didn’t reside in the Terminal proper, holed up in the outside hanger bays and abandoned dry-docks. Seroth couldn’t figure why they believed those locales were safer or more shielded than the Termina Main itself but didn’t argue the logic with himself. Every hall he crossed was thick with corpses. Ice, combined with freezing temperatures, made it difficult, impossible, to tell the age of the dead laying in parted crowds on the ground. Post-mortem jaw-bites and slashes to lap at long dried, crystallized blood told that creatures had been haunting the floor-level, on the prowl. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet… He sensed a lack of something to the air. Coming out into the main foyer from the adjacent wing, Seroth looked down onto the main flooring below. As before, this third occasion, empty roof panes robbed of glass, stuck with shards glancing light in strange colours as last-light and his band-lamp swung about, snow was falling to create a bleached mound amidst silence electronics. The lad made the long leap down, falling with a controlled whirl that twisted his boots heel down into the packed snows. He rode a brief avalanche down to the icy-greasy tiling, eyes hunting for signs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Bodies. With more beside them, in twisted outlines indicative of mutilation. Sithspawn. Dead Sithspawn. Seroth crept forward, blade high in a parrying guard, toeing over one cadaver. Bladework had seen to this one: economic blows that ripped through the meat entangling a gaping throat, scythed into through the ribs and savaged the multiple hearts, lungs, esophagus. A blow to the hip and mid-waist… And a nasty, curt gash that broke vertebrae and sliced the spinal cord. Seroth checked over a second corpse, a third after, pausing at a fourth, mystified. All bore similar battle-trauma, alongside broken limbs showcasing outright shattered bones. Imagination tunneled with handfuls of viable explanations: most likely, a Sith could do this. Yet the air lacked in the natural ozone waft that was always left behind whenever Force energy was expended. A wookie? Some massive anthropoid? Perhaps some cyberized war-frame, utilizing exo-skeletal framework to enhance and augment their natural strength?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Perhaps… But tech-augments added weight. There was only one soft set of boot prints amidst the claw-churns belonging to the two score beasts laying in perfect waste. Seroth rose, adjusted the lamp on his headband, then ventured on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every lock keeping transport corridors empty for maintenance personnel were broke. Cutting lines scarred the steel and hard plastic, renting through thickly plied security auto-doors that swung on broken servo-motors. The lad hurried on, jogging lightly, feeling the air beginning to freeze the soft sponge-tissue in his lungs. Glasteel windows and portholes showed growing pitch dipping a bleed of shadow onto the skies. Another moment, besides softer degrees of lambent illumination, Seroth could only see by the glow-lamp.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Someone had forced the doors into the initial, open dry-dock. Or partially, Seroth thought. There must’ve been a leakage of a kind outside that dripped a steady growth of stalagmite-esque frost and ice growth up over the door jamb, effectively creating a natural barrier requiring either melting explosives or great physicality to budge. Someone had chosen sheer brute effort: the auto-doors were bent like dog-eared pages. The lad pressed through, gripping his cleats to the ice, pausing to stare up at the gut-work of a dreadnought hung above in silent berth. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Trembling air shook oil-hardened chains dangling from industrial rails. The floor was scattered with patches of black ice, engine components, nav-card boards, and abandoned weld-cutters, bolt-fasteners, a hundred differing mechanical implements. Amidst the industrial waste and machine carnage rested more beasts taken to the slaughter. The unknown swordsperson had mended their way through, painting snow drifts coming in from the open dry-dock hanger-doors and glittering walls with arterial sprays. Seroth bent and levered a re-stuck door open with his axe, grunting. Another connecting hall, portholes smashed out, flicking jewels of idling water-crystals to stir as the lad’s head-lamp swung a slowly arcing line. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The cold was starting to eat its way through the failing thermal-lines in his heat-tunic. Seroth tried forcing a few repairs as he strolled, palming sealant-strips over the fabric cuts and hoping they would conduct a bit of warmth back into his shivering kidneys. If he could survive relieving the beleaguered refugees probably forced to hide out in any of the unguarded berths, he’d pick his way back to the Iron Snake and spend the night warming before attempting the rendezvous with battalion commander Boudica. He could still feel the damp inside his gloves. This was the meat of his work: under-armed, armoured, with little in the way of back up or potential reinforcement, edging his way through man-made ruins on the hunt. Devilish excitement whet his tongue. Seroth shouldered on and held his blade up and close.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There came a clamor. Seroth paused, bracing his ears to the sound. …Running boot-steps scattering tools out of the way underfoot. A ringing tone that met, wetly, into solid matter that gave and scattered further matter onto surfaces of ferrocrete, plastic siding, steel, and ice. Raised voices beyond, muffled: a dozen, a score, perhaps three quarters under a hundred voices, maybe more? He broke into a run, leaping over fallen shapes lying dead or dying under his strides. It was the third hanger running north from Terminal C when he found Sujela’s displaced companions and their homeless relatives. Throaty generators powered on arc-lights hanging from welded rails overhead, highlighting the settlement: broken tents and lean-to hovels, blankets, roll out beds, mess kitchens, a make-do medical longhouse built from scattered vessel hulls, pillaged and repurposed machinery helping act as kludged together stoves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Some of the dead were figures that hadn’t been able to make it quick enough for the shored up overseer offices. But most were either homunculus beast-things or enlarged war-creatures split from groin to chin. Seroth saw their slayer: one man, dressed for the tundra in tight clothing, fitted with a black vest, a short agal wrapped over his brow, surrounded by a small horde of some sixteen monsters trying to bring him down. The lad just gawked; they could not touch him. He was a blur of rage and steel, a straight, double-edged sword held in hands he couldn’t see truly moving, they were weaving so fast. The arcing edge cut in blows and strikes patterned on fighting disciplines he’d never quite encountered before, though they were reminiscent of some lessons old Shev Rayner had run through in demo. One by one by two, the clash was turning gamely in his favour. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He looked up, noticing Seroth hurtling in, giving a triumphant whoop. The fight was joined and vitae and gore began washing up at their ankles. The lad followed the elder’s lead, noting a bristly chin peppered with salty-white and grey. In tandem they killed and killed again. The stranger took a beast by its throat, severing the head, stabbing forward through the skull into a second yawning mouth, sundering that growling thing before ripping around to glide his sword through an unguarded belly. Seroth blocked an assail of blade-claws, guarding before slashing into wheeling parries, cutting until their hides gave and he could seek his vibrosword through organs and brain-matter. Sixteen became eight. Became four. Then just two and then the one. The beast fell apart, quartered by shared blows that scythed its torso free of limbs and head.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It stank of foul organ-spill. Seroth was leaning over his knees, breathing hard. The man chuckling at his side seemed only bothered that he had ichor clinging onto his garb, sheathing his blade beside a second sword hung behind his shoulder. He stuck a hand in before Seroth’s face, waiting for a recognizing clench. He took the stranger’s palm… noted with a wide grimace his ferocious grip… and shook.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Well met, boy.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The Man from Nowhere said his name was:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seroth.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And what is Seroth doing in a cold den like this?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Replies took time to sow themselves. Slowly, peering face by face, those steeled behind the locked autodoors keeping the supervisor and back quarter offices sealed began to gently ease back into the hanger space. Seroth stepped in beside Ajax as both worked to lever the stuck entrances open. Someone had blowtorched the control panels, melting them into glib boxes, just fused plastics, molten glass frozen dry, and stinking silicon circuit boards warped by the cutting fire. Pry-bars fitted into the door creases. Seroth leaned back his way, Seroth on his, arms bunching to make the stubborn servo-motors pull back on their tracks. The lad watched the Stranger simply shrug and make his portion of doorway squeal back in a brief hurdle of sparks. Seroth grimaced, braced down his feet, and slowly began to make the same process though his labour was greater. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One survivor, a tall man with ruddy skin, sandy hair and a wise face beaten with fear, approached the pair. He was dressed in coveralls over a heat-skin, crusted with dried blood over his brow and cheek. A child, a young girl, presumably his daughter, hid her face behind his hip. Ajax regarded him and took his proffered hand. Wordlessly, he turned to Seroth and invited the same gesture. Finally, he loosed a long, cool breath and stroked sweat off his face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That was too close…” He sighed, shaking. “Supervisor Milliken. Licensed machinery operator, mechanic… Homeless too, apparently.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The displaced of Hanger 3 off Terminal B were picking their feet through the carnage sowed by their attackers. Most were uneasy to come near the still, mammalian corpses that leaked heat and blood off their corpses. Sounds of weeping began to issue, families finding the loved ones too slow or taken by surprise. Milliken couldn’t look their way. His eyes spoke of dread, of seeing the thoughtless savagery and depravity that tore their way through bodies, unable to cope with surveying the cruel handiwork. Cold winds off the growing tundra north-west blew in through the open bay doors. Milliken cussed, turning to two teenagers that were helping clean up the tool scatter. They looked up at his crisp whistle.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Milliken pointed for the hanger entry-face. “Forget the tools. Just grab one of the solder kits, get Owen to come with you, and get those doors closed. At least the atmosphere shields, before we all freeze to death. There ya go.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You did well to get so many to safety and so quickly,” Ajax said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah? Yeah, not… Not enough… Gods help me, they just… Came out of nowhere, screaming and… And howling, like… They’d just made the harrow up from the Nine Hells. I don’t understand it…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned, surveying the tableaus of weeping individuals knelt beside bodies; their prostrate and spread eagled in stuck ponds of blood. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If you both hadn’t come along – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But we did,” Ajax said, patting the man’s chest. “Do not think on ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’. Those are poisons for the conscience. Know that you saved them, and bought myself and my friend here time to deal with the scum.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Yeah, who are you two?” Millkiken asked. Seroth glanced to Ajax, who deferred to him in turn. The lad nodded and fixed his vibro-sword back into its shoulder-sheathe. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m Seroth,” He said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And I am Ajax. This is our trade,” He swept his hand out to highlight the carnage. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So you come out of nowhere and start fightin’ monsters, ‘cause someone’s paying you to?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…More or less, but details are irrelevant. My colleague and I have some points to discuss ourselves. I believe, for now, the danger is over.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How can you be sure?” Milliken asked. “How do you know more won’t come crawling out of the woodwork?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax did not reply. As Milliken walked away, Seroth observed him take a long silk-scarf from his belt-pouches and begin cleaning off the grime and beast-gore clinging onto his blade. The lad was mesmerized: it was a piece of folded Serascene steel, plated with silver, given edges as bright as a serrated mountain peak. Oil the colours of cinnamon and honey ran down the fuller, dripped from the point. At his hand-cock, he sat down beside him on a mechanics rub, right at the flank of a laid-out creature the lad figured Ajax had opened wide with his killing sword. Then the lad looked up and noted a strange, off-setting detail in the Man from Nowhere. His eyes were pair of vertical ovals carefully dilated into thick slits, iris’ long fields of wolfish gold. Ajax saw the start in the lad’s expression, leaning in over the dead creature at their knees. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Thank you for assistance,” He said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blinked. “You’re welcome but… I saw how you fought. I don’t think you needed an extra blade. You could have finished the fight, aidless, and easily.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax shrugged. “Tell me, do you spit in the eye of the wolf who comes to aid you in the hunt? No? I do not spit in your eyes, then, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After a silence, the lad took out his sheathe-knife, paring the beasts’ ever-tough hide. “…Ajax, who are you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who are you, young man? May I call you Seroth?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. Of course.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Such a friendly wolf,” Chuckled Ajax, observing the impromptu dissection. “Who am I, well, I am poor man who wanders through and asks ‘Have you monsters that need seeing to?’ If they open their doors, then there is work to be had. If they try to shoot me, then I had best move on. Sometimes, my work is not so simple. I fight and I kill, because these things are natural to me. Once in a while, I find myself able to perform some kindnesses. This is Ajax.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A man I could just barely see as he swung his blade, a fighting blur, stronger than any ordinary man but not waxing Force power,” Seroth murmured. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are Sensitive, Seroth?” He watched the lad nod, and then smiled lightly. “I see. Most don’t know, and so assume. You are right: I did not use any Power, nor do I ordinarily. Though I have a few tricks~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad at his side gritted his lips close, taking a moment to rip a section of hide away from bone and organ to peer into the creature’s foetid innards. He was curious to their make, wondering after the biological specifics that rendered the spawn so dangerous, so formidable. Seroth had been able to match and slay them, but only just: he possessed only so much sheer ability before the advantage would swing out of his court-end. The Sithspawn were too fast, too strong, and deathly tough.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hard vermin, ja?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth nodded. “Very. It must be in how they’re made… Their quickness, their power. Bone ossification, muscle and organ mutation, enhanced neural sheathes, quicker reflexes, response time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are an anthropologist.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, I’ve just… learned to be studious about details. Bestiaries, journals, you know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye,” Ajax nodded. “But take my word, that these efforts to create such ‘perfect’ killers are, at best, a crude mockery of truer alchemy. I look at this thing – and I see waste. It’s traumatized, not refined. They are potent, but primitive nonetheless.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A length of sharp rock can still be deadly.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Very true!” Ajax laughed. He held up his blade idling in his lap. “This is my ‘rock’. Very sharp, don’t you think?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth nodded ruefully. “You were cutting them down like they were nothing. I thought it was just your strength.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It was, to an extent,” Ajax admitted. “But when this blade was put to an anvil, it was kissed with the blood of these daemons, fashioned with silver, steel, and meteor-iron. Magic conceived this sword. For Sithspawn of any kind, there is no defense. In their blood is a fear for silver, for it kills.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I’m not sure something like a Leviathan would be too frightened of a silver toothpick.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, but even something like that Beast from Akure can meet its end on the tip of something as humble as this,” Ajax sheathed the sword back over his shoulder. “…You do very well biding the hundred questions you possess behind your tongue.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Am I so obvious?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. I’ve learned to read the expressions of wolves, to know them better than they of themselves. You’re a very curious man, Seroth. Might I say… curiously troubled.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth pursed his lips, furrowed his brow, looking over a nine-chambered heart and its twin behind over twenty bars of bone-ribs. “You said ‘our’ trade, talking to that man. …How did you know I’m a hunter?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fairly obviously. You wear gear more suited for the wilds than urban pacification. You wield blades with not a blaster to be seen. And you came alone. Some would say you’re simply some Je’daii on the lam, but you lack the pungency that comes with being in their presence.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Careful. I haven’t bathed yet~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ha! Seroth – “ Ajax began a little more gravely. “You can ask your questions. But for my privacy, I’d like not to answer them with so many ears about. Some truths can frighten. Can you wait upon me?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can. …But these things,” Seroth pried his knife from the beast’s hide. “Something bothers me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Let us see if our wits match, then,” Ajax edged closer on the rug and leaned himself over the bisected cross-section. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The Mandalorians pulped this world almost into glass. Most major population centers are ruins, down to their sub-surface structures.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmn.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Before that, the Sith had fled. Some brave patriots stayed, but the alchemists, the scientists, biologists, anthropologists, they exiled prior. Whatever creations they didn’t take with them surely died in the bombardments.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Unless the victors missed some hidden zoo,” Ajax shrugged.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s possible and maybe its taken the beasts weeks to reach Kaas City, where they could sense food.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahh, but you do not believe that. So happens, neither do I,” Ajax sat back on his heels. “I will tell you how I came to be here, at the world’s end. Word reached me through… sources, let us say. They tell me ‘Kaas City is dead but there are people still, and something has come to kill them.’ I make the journey, though I am bothered by what I find. There is death, ja, folk suffering, dying. I am saddened but their hurt does not perplex me. It is these animals. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They leave little evidence, if any at all, to say of how they came to find this refugee camp. They just appear. That is not the way of things, young wolf. Even the necrophage, the undead, vampyr and lycanthrope, these things have causality. They make their lairs and nest, waiting for the dark to emerge. There are no nests. They are just here, appearing from behind thin air, and have begun their grisly work. I would like to know, very much, who has brought them here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth rose with Ajax as he came up off his haunches and stood, wiping down ice-flakes from his agal. They both adjusted the rides of their back-sheathes, watching as, finally, the hanger bay doors began to grind inward on underpowered servos and grating cog-teeth. Ventilation began thrumming hot air down from ceiling ducts and distribution shaft-mouths mounted on the wall and siding. “You believe there’s outsiders at work here? Like us?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, but where we put these things to death, they are sowing them. I am… uncertain… Of whatever purpose is at work in this place. Young wolf, be on your guard.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then Ajax began to shoulder his way to the far concourse exit, gently pacing and stepping around refugees busily reconstructing their tent-village and seeing to restarting their kludged ovens. Seroth called after him, listening to outside winds lash across the hanger’s sheet-siding. “Where are you going?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I have matters to see to. The hunt must be followed up. Can’t you scent it, the evil on the wind? …Stay well, young wolf!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He shrugged through the far entry doors, disappearing on into the dark umbilical-hall, faint light glittering off the metal of his cross-hilts. The lad regarded his enigma; like himself but so very different, age wizened and empowered by means he couldn’t understand. Not yet. Scents of drifting cookeries began edging up his nostrils. Refugees took their care in binding up the dead in white storage cloths, though many bled through with stigmatic, reddening stains. A long row of some twelve lost were laid out with local honours on the far wall, below a suspended fixed-wing jacked off the hull of the overhead berthed frigate. Milliken was by the doors, calling out instructions; he was trying to set a watch guard for the night. Rifles with rivet-guns were handed out. Wishful ‘foot soldiers’ rustled past Seroth, paying him no heed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax was correct. In a tight ball within his stomach roiled suggestions. There was purpose behind this seemingly random even of Sithspawn happening upon Slahtiz Port. Some malice whispered in trails of wind, ached in the cold. Seroth drew on his cloak and began walking out.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Kaas City[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]~Kaile Ward[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]~Gargant Hall[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth flew for Gargant Hall and his expected meeting with Commander Boudica at first light. There were no stars overnight: a blizzard gale with the fury of a Calabed whisked over the grounds belonging to Slahtiz Port and blanketed the flat tarmacs in snow dunes and what was becoming a growing tundra desert. It was his curious habit; regardless of locale, the lad felt dawn tug him up from slumber unerringly. The Iron Snake warmed her engines, then wrenched free of coating ice attempting to freeze the landing stanchions into the pavement. It set forward and gunned high over Kaas City’s broken skyscraper-crags.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Kaile Ward was Kaas City’s western-most district, on the edge of flash-frozen swampland, mangroves, man-made estuaries, and a dozen other pseudo-marine biomes losing out against the inflicted winter. Gargant Hall itself was nestled in a shielded bowl of surrounding hab-blocks, dug in against snowed in piles of building rubble, sporting one of the few spots in Kaas City still generating power off a portion of preserved grid. It looked as a hall should have: long, tall, narrow, with a box-like pagoda built atop the central bump in its roof spinal-ride, blinking narrow red air-traffic lights. Snow and thicker blankets of black-ash tried to restrain the brilliant gold-copper hue-plates coating the high walls and armoured glasteel panes. Below were patrolling squads, with their bobbing light-poles, sweeping torches, armed and armoured in Sith-issue extreme environ haz-suits. Some paused, watching the guncutter running a circuit.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a single landing-pad: others were just buckled remnants hanging weakly off broken support stanchion-legs. Seroth guided the Snake in for berth, hands swiftly manipulating the dashboard, putting out broadcast idents and the AEL company writ of security. He watched personnel rush out onto the pad, securing his guncutter with anchoring feeds into recessed mag-hooks. Seroth rose, donned his field gear, adjusting the ride of axe, knife, and sword, then depressed a switch just behind the cockpit nose. A debarkation ramp slammed down against rockrete and snows. From the pad entryway along a broad gantry bridge came an escort: six assault troopers donned in white plate-armour, underarmour camouflaged for inclement operations, with long carbines resting against shoulder crooks. One with the livery of a squad captain approached, stamped his boot to the ground, halting his procession.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Writ, please!” She barked. Politely.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth obliged and slapped a dataslate into his waiting glove-palm. The Captain whisked through the vouching documents, though he sensed imperceptible stares observing him behind her black-on-black facial visor. He took back his datapad as the troopers stole in around him a rough circle. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Come with us!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They walked through the narrow portcullis into the interior. The guard loosened the sealant-robes about their throats when hot AC currents gusted in from a high ceiling, already quickly feeling a damp growing along the interior body-sleeves around their armpits, belly, and groin. Between frostbite outside, suffering heat-rashes under cover, Seroth wondered what further hardships were attempting to plink through whatever formidable discipline kept the Sith troopers in check. At the Imperial Dissolve, scores of wish-to-be warlords and dread monarchs ordered their armies to uproot, loot what they could in war materiel, currency, and valuables, stealing out into the Unknown Regions and Wild Space to establish a new wave of hegemonies. Commander Boudica and the Kaile Garrison elected to stay, it seemed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Pride in decoration was still in order. The long vault-corridors were resplendent with blood-red carpets feathered in ruby threads and inlaid gold flakes, off-duty soldiery working at carpentry on wood paneling decorum rather than standard duranium bunker-walls. Glow-lamps hung off suspended iron-chains, tinkling in the AC air-drafts, casting everything in cones of broad gold light, warm shadows hanging off still holo-portraits depicting proud series’ of former Hall Commanders. Kaile Garrison had their pride. A little cold and urban desolation wouldn’t cow that from them.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was escorted down through nine flights of stairwells, given a functioning tour of sorts as the Captain marched them on a swift gait. The lad kept up, passing bustling personnel in the halls, hauling portable heaters, hills of dataslates, ammunition crates, heat blankets, armour, and carbine rifles. Few looked up to pay heed. Most wore beads of sweat soaking gently into their high, starched collars. The Captain guided the way through Gargant Hall’s inner namesake: The Hall of Oaths. It was a stark fifty-meter chapel presided over by bronze-cast statuettes hooded, gripping powerfully gloved hands over the pommels of ancient blades. Even hanging chandelier cages were somehow candle-lit overhead, or perhaps simply powered by small, wired glow-bulbs, Seroth couldn’t tell. Rows of blood-red carpeting stretched from end-to-end, where rested a formidable pair of cast-turadium gates, flecked with silver plate-nubs, locked down by three long, anti-breaching Mando’a iron bars.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ceremonial throne dais was converted into a makeshift command station. Power cords ran in from a dozen separate adjacent and ancillary corridors. A score of high steel tables wreathed with portable holo-emitters, field computers, datapads, paper readouts, and stacks of interchangeable hard-drives lined the dais from wall to wall. Seroth spotted Commander Boudica. She was decked still in her gunmetal grey and white edged field gear, full head shorter than the captains and lieutenants surrounding her, but she had their attention. Her voice was an atonal clip of rough growls that strangled and grated air up from her throat. Boudica brooked nothing less than total, unwavering attention. When she looked up to spot the escort, her armoured mail-hand rose, flexed closed, dismissing her own entourage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She walked up as bodies wove out of her way, gesturing the Captain out of her way. Seroth saw it: the long, polished hilt of chrome and duraplast at her hip. A lightsaber Suddenly his temples began to wring with pressure. Chaotic resonances wafted in the air between himself and the Commander. Like he had seen in the eyes of Varanin, Jacobs, Halcyon, and Shena, dark fire ringed around her pupils: power ignorant of its own conceit. Boudica was Sith in more than just military hierarchy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are the man recommended from Mistress Merrill,” Boudica said, looking him up and down. “I expected someone more mercenary.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmn.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is that all you have to say for yourself?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I leave personal observations for others, Commander,” Seroth replied. “I’m just a slayer.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh!” She grunted and led him to one set of hololith desks. Crystaline tables glowed with upraised holograms. It was a representation of a stunted city within the ruined metropolis; like Gargant Hall, it nestled in an open bowl-pit, raised on all sides by industrial factory levels and abandoned habitation-blocks. An undercity, Seroth realized. Kaas City’s preserved ghetto.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kaile Ward is famous for two things, Mister Slayer,” Boudica started. “Gargant Hall, and Hythe Park. Hythe Park grew up when no one wanted to build on property facing the west swamp-lands. The poor came here and, somehow, managed to tame and drain the delta running out into the marshes. First it was just a tent village. Then it became a proper village, so on and so forth, ‘till you have what Hythe Park is today: …fethin’ virtual medieval city, laws all to its own, like if someone scooped up a chunk of Nar Shaddaa and plunked it down. …And Hythe Park is all that is left of Kaas City.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And under your protection.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m the only queen with enough iron to organize them into something that might survive this ice-age,” Boudica spat. “They hate me as Garrison Commander and they are going to hate me more as Tyrant. But I’ve no choice. The Dark Lords have fled. There are no standing armies on Dromund Kaas: Damn-His-Eyes-Vulcanus saw to that. And much belated Varanin isn’t coming back. I am on my own,” She sighed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You sent word to Rave Merrill and she sent word to me,” Seroth gently prodded. “What do you need a slayer for?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“First understand, Mister Slayer,” Boudica gestured to the hall encompassing them. “This is all I have. I’ve roughly three hundred men and women to look after almost six hundred thousand citizens. You can’t begin to understand my troubles. But you can help me with one, it so happens.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her hands manipulated a few circuit-knobs, expanding the holoboard up for further details, scrolling around the slum perimeter. “We’re stretched for manpower. I can only spare so many patrols to look after the outskirts, including the shoreline. At first I thought the worst would just be raiders from the inner city. Some Captains of mine anticipated that a few noble houses would have dug in rather than shirk from their ancestral holds. In time, they believed we would have to contend with House Militia coming to raid Hythe Park for supplies. …Instead, I have monsters coming ‘round to eat my people.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That is why you are here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmn,” Seroth grunted, looking over the topographical readouts and local geography. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know where they’ve come from. The Mandalorian batteries should have blasted anything worthwhile into slag. I’m leaving their point of origin and their extermination up to you, Mister Slayer. There’s a lot of credits riding on whether or not you perform satisfactorily.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Show me what you know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Boudica called up an enhancement of the western swamp-shores. “Here’s where accounts have purported seeing the beasts emerge. A rough estimate. The locals will know more. They always do, it looks like. Get down there, mingle, hunt, do whatever it is your kind are supposed to and rid me of these gods-damned things. Before my whole garrison is eaten alive.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The conversation ended at the Commander’s brisk nod, turning away from the table to march away for Gargant Hall’s eastern wings. Seroth didn’t ask after her; Boudica’s shoulders were crunched in and peaked veins throbbed below her ruddy hairline. The end of the world was charging down at her doorstep and at her beck and all were less than so many hundred plus soldiers. Her charge and honor was to ensure survival. Until Dromund Kaas could dig itself up out of its own grave and avenge itself on those who had wronged, betrayed, and abandoned it to cold doom. The Captain and her soldiery rounded Seroth into crisp escort, marching back the way they’d arrived. Formalities with Commander Boudica were over. Seroth contemplated his tasks, walking underneath gold light hanging from polished chandeliers.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Kaas City[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]~Hythe Park[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Park was built on a slow ingress that gently fed the western trails of increasingly shanty housing and built-in factories into a long, shallow riverbed. Plummeting temperatures turned the infinite salt-brine and mangrove landscape beyond Kaas City into an amalgamated hell, of flash-frozen vistas caked in clear ice, of deep swamp rivers now solid from soft bed-floor to where awnings of dipped roots now stuck in against the freeze. Seroth flew the Iron Snake high over the upper hab-towers before landing on a small tract of unguarded roofing, north of the thickly populated town squares. He departed from his vessel but not before seeing that it was bolted locked against intrusion. An unguarded guncutter was a prize of temptation: break the lock-seals, jury-rig engine ignition, and any jackanape with their closer allies had a surefire method of leaving deathly Dromund Kaas behind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Inner-city was called the Heartland. Seroth paid a local rickshaw-runner idling on break to take him there. Upon arrival, he was blasted by brays of mechanical industry, standing along a long street showcasing its crumbling age underfoot yet refused to cave. Cobble-workers plugged fresh clay bricks into roughened, empty patches, utilizing screaming rock-cutters to hew through stubborn angles, spreading over washing sand. There was sound, motion, smell, colliding in mind-jarring combinations. Space was a premium. Seroth likened it to being caught in thick bush, stuck between corridors of soaring trees canopying with shade that blotted the sun. He looked up: the Heartland was closed over with overlaying roof-juts. There was no snow; steam funneled up from coursing sewage canals below the street-work. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Outside foundry works acting as an industrial curtain refused Hythe Park and her citizenry any further spacial luxury north, east, and south. The swamplands were unworkable. So they built up, in high co-habitation centers that acted as both living space and manufacturing quarters. Seroth ducked out of the way, as someone in dunked chunky sloshes of grey-effluence and mire into the street. A waiting man in fourth-hand clothing adjusted his rag-belt and bent his hand out to collect alms; when enough credits were tossed his way, he unfurled a pristine, spring-loaded durasteel mop and studiously cleaned the reeking malady staining the sidewalk. When enough was mopped up, he discharged the ruined water into an opened manhole, turned the bucket round, and opened an outside faucet to full gush, lacing in a bacterial killing, bleaching agent into the water swirl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There were still overhangs of vegetable growth; some building faces kept up a sport of greenery. Lichen curtains hung in threaded clumps right down to the underfoot avenues. Individuals would pause, grip the ivy hang in their hands, and wring out enough moisture to fill styrafoam cups. Heat running up the hab-towers to the roofing was helping to aid in thawing out the daily snow-drifts, the run-off collecting in the floral collections that endured in narrow spout culverts overrun with compost and dirt. Seroth stepped up to one lichen-tentacle, raising it up to his mouth and giving it a tough strangle. Mouthfuls of almost too-cold water slaked his thirst. Physical traffic ran around him. One long, dirty face looked his way and measured the lad up, shrugging before adjusting the ride of a long bag draped over her hunched back.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]However, despite faces of grim stoicism, little could be done to hide over damages inflicted like torture lashings on some of the decaying architecture. Some entire blocks were missing, shelled out, just emptied lots of burning rubble lending more heat to the under-smog. Portions of the streetways and side-passages were scooped out by fallen energy-shell blasts. One neighborhood was plastered from wall to wall with missing persons signs asking for assistance in locating the lost; most were old by a few months, the moisture eating through the cheap poster pages. Seroth followed along with a swerving line of sidewalk flow, bustled shoulder to shoulder with cowed-faced survivors. No one was clean; stenches of sour sweat, effluence, unwashed clothing, and physical waste lent a thick, ‘organic’ texture to the air. The lad looked right; a public playground was cleared out to host make-shift houses built in lean-tos and sewn together tents, trawl tarps, water-proof awnings and whatever else could be repurposed. Open grill pits cooked lengths of oversized sewer rodents. He watched a father offer shish kabobs to his children. The man knelt and tried to adjust their undone snow-ponchos.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Heartland opened into a kilometer wide machined public square. It acted as a simultaneous impromptu meeting zone, an open stall grocery center, locales for local musicians to perform their compositions for pocket change, with scores of notice boards. Seroth stepped out from the crowd bustle; precisely what he had been looking for. Each noticed board was a grimy length of machine-stamped tin and cheap metals. Advertisements were writ out on spread sheets of grease paper, white cardboard, and any length of flat surface that would take permanent marker and not smudge. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Missing person’s notifications were as recent by a day. Seroth expected a few dozen: there were hundreds. He peered along a sea of monochrome printed faces, some from holo-pict scenes, others from homegrown IDs. As many specifics regarding their age, weight, build, physical characteristics, habits, and last known locales they frequented were writ in stamped, bold print. All ended with similar tag lines: last seen by the west-shores. Fifty, he began counting. One hundred. Two hundred. Four hundred. At half a thousand posters, Seroth looked away. The Spawn had been busy in the interim: they showed no slow in slaking their hunger. Hythe Park chugged on… albeit fearfully. It was why no one could look across and peer at Seroth with a full stare; a few day’s time, they’d recall him when looking up who were the latest souls missing in the Downfall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nearby doddered a pair of ancient Taro’s. Long foreheads atop flattened nose-bridges and stern mouths peered up, sighing, at the innumerable posters. They chattered, paying no heed to the armed lad some eight paces away. Despite the formidably unreliable nature of word-of-mouth, experience taught him there was always a grain of truth to rumour. He stilled and listened to their throaty conversation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hhaagghh…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh don’t sigh like that. You do that every time we come. There’s new faces, what else did you expect?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I could hope it stopped.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s not. It’s not ever going to stop. Mark it today, Kes’seid. It’ll stop whenever this damned winter thaws out. And you know what those blood Forecasters up in their spires are saying about that.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Five hundred years. I heard it too. We’re going to slowly freeze to death over five centuries. What are we supposed to do about that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nothing. We live for now, and let the next few generations sweat it out. How we’ve always done. …See anyone?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Anyone who?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Anyone we know!” Barked the second voice. Frayed nerves, the lad noticed. They were hiding behind patented, bald disinterest to keep the welling fear out of their words.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Thankfully not. Not as I can see. They never take these down, so we’ll never know unless we take a look around.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. We won’t. People ‘taking a look around’ are the next ones for the boards. Feth it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One of the Taro leaned close, using an black-stained washcloth to wipe down their bare cheeks. “…It’s getting worse, I hear.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Gods, enough of it, who doesn’t know that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s getting bad, I tell you. The local crews are at a loss; heard something made its way into the Desujel Hotel few nights ago and ate Boss Segar in his bed. When his crew came running up to see what the commotion was about, you know what they found?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Same as all the other scenes? Blood, bone, skin, and organs everywhere.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh aye! …And a vision of some horror they haven’t tried describing to anyone else but themselves.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I swear, you’re never more in your element then when you’ve got misery in the air.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The pair stepped away from the notice boards, unheeding of the tall man behind settling into peruses of notice boards, shop stalls, and caterwauling musicians. “But it tells me something.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What’s that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re not safe in our beds.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Obviously.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What’s Boudica doing about this?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Currently? A lot of nothing. She only has so many soldiers, which the crews around love harassing, and Gods know recruiting from our lot is like fishing for diamond dust in a river of shid. Supposedly? She’s trying to watch for raiders.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Raiders!? We’re getting eaten in our damn beds!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We have close to a million bundled up in the Park. She’s not even a tenth of those numbers. We got promise she’ll be hanging about to be iron-assed on our accounts, what more can we expect?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Something!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We can expect this, I think…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth adjusted the ride of his hood-cowl, damp trails of collecting water falling off his cloak. The Taro picked up her rumination. “…The Maneaters will keep coming from the swamplands west. They’re not content to scavenge the abandoned hovels lining along the shore-ways; so they’ll infiltrate deeper and deeper on into the Park. Through the sewers, the old Course Tunnels, maybe even dig their way along. Mark it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tell the lot of us something new. Feth it all… What if they’re beneath our feet this very moment?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I would so love to tell you to keep your shiddy ideas to yourself, but you might not be so far off.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I heard they found a Golland Girl in one of the back alleys. Like something out of the old Kaille Ripper stories. Sight to churn the stomachs of even butchers. Apparently there was something scrawled out in blood, messaging someone or summat along those lines?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Well what the hell did it say?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Local crew washed it out before anyone could really read up on it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then it may as well have never been. …It’s getting colder, isn’t it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah…” Seroth murmured under his breath, fixing the ride of his tools. “It is…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Cover and warmth grew more intensely sparse the further any souls ventured from Hythe Park’s Heartland and enclosed labyrinthine network of connected avenues and hab-spires. Seroth heard footsteps out in the twilight; footsteps crunching over ice, hard insulate-rubber soles packed with cleats. He looked out from his abandoned fishing stall, seeing a figure walking its way through desolate Scale Mile. Prior administrative coin-masters preferred using offworld foodstuffs and imported specialties to feed the populace. Hythe Park was the last, rare spot where unpolluted fang-trout and catfish could be harvested from the inner swamp lagoons. Scale Mile was laced with now-abandoned fisheries, warehouses, remnants of specific industry killed by fall out. …And monsters hunting the fishers from the cover of the marshes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The figure coming through the snow curtain didn’t seem bothered. They carried a line-pole, with bait box, shivering in their heat-cloak. Seroth saw him before the man looked up and noticed his piercing gaze watching him. He waved, tentatively. When the man in the cowl didn’t quite reply, he braved strolling up, tipped off his hood, and joined him in huddling in the stall. There was a small fire melting through the sheeting and ice underfoot; little flames but blessedly warm. Seroth fed further micro-logs into the coals. The Fisher looked him over: at his sword, the ride of axe and knife at his waist-belts, sitting calmly with pensive gazes. The lad was watching the far inlets across the frozen, nameless river. Animal-like tracks were eroded in well-worn pathways zigging onto the prior inhabited Scale Mile; but the footsteps cracked into the hardening soft-sand could not have belonged to any locale fauna. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Roughly humanoid figures between six and seven feet in height, hundred-fifty pounds plus, covered in mottled hides burly with fur, some with scale, others hairless, more showing in between features. With talon toes and long, knuckled hands running on all fours. They left behind spoor stenches, wretches of phlegm, and frozen drool. Alongside trace crystals of ruby-blood frozen black as deep carmine. Seroth knew the signs; knew the differences between animal instinct and the ordinary beast, to what these beasts truly were. Twilight was like a silver epoch between the day and coming night. The lad recalled Ajax and Slahtiz Port: what the elder hunter warned about evil scents coyly hiding behind the frigid, dry air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Fisher joining him in the stall worked to compile a small heat-auger in his hands. He looked up: dark skin cracked by salt air, clean shaven but for a tuft beneath his bottom lip, white-ink tattoos showing rainfall pouring off his bare scalp. Manipulating the fine knobs on his tool proved difficult. The Fisher had suffered with some debilitating arthritis that bent his fingers down against, ironically like fins. Cursing, he bumped the augur-screw against Seroth’s arm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can you adjust that? Needs something like… Seventy five for that dial,” He pointed over the lad’s lap. “Ninety for that one. I think. Can’t fethin’ make my hands work right now. Must be pill time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Wordlessly, Seroth diligently completed the reading adjustments and handed it back. The Fisher tested the augur: its fan-screwblades glowed hot as white-steel, whirring gamely. He cackled and powered it down. “Ha! I about killed someone when I thought I’d lost that little thing when some shell blew up my tackle-shop. Folks laughed and wondered why I held onto an augur for ice fishing when it’s always been hotter ‘en hell on the Scale Mile. Now I’m laughing! …Pity there isn’t enough around to share the humour.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Fisher opened his tackle box, selecting various grotesque lures. “I was worried the cold would have killed off all the pickings. …Half right, half wrong. All that’s worthwhile grabbing at the godi’s. Do you know what a godi is?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shook his head.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s a bottom-feeder. Real tough scales but the meat’s tender. Longer than my arm, twice as thick, nastiest temperament I’ve seen this side of hell. Tricky to de-bone, but worth it if you take your time. Fethin’ gourmet’s used to pay through the septum for it. …No gourmet’s anymore, just locals reading out of the cookbook. They pay enough, decently.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I didn’t think we’d ever seen an offworlder here,” The Fisher murmured suddenly. “Word got around there was a strange type lurking around. No one rightly saw his face but he was always hovering just on the edge of conversation. Listening… Walking around, looking for old blood, sniffing at dead scents. I figured it was one of Boudica’s crew but… Here you are. Trying to fish with your sword.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winds encroached on the stall. The pair listened to a low keen whistle its way through thin slivers propped between metal-sidings left to freeze upright in the ground, feeling the wind-notes reeve their way into their marrow. Seroth propped himself up against the back wall a little higher; his hand reached and tugged his sword down onto his lap, one smooth motion the Fisher watched. The lad tossed a few more micro-logs into the fire. Small flames combusted higher, glowing them with warm colour, lending dry heat to keep out the wet frost trying to squirm its way through the open windows. He was still peering over the glacial river, by now the long shadows beneath the far, naked trees now swelling as twilight began to quiet and die. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t know if there’ll be much to catch tonight,” The Fisher ruminated.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Something will come,” Said the boy, finally. The Fisher looked up at him, as if surprised he should have a voice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You think? S’been quiet the last few nights… Unless I had phantoms passing me in the dark, ignoring my old bones.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If you meet them – “ He gestured to the ice-river.” Out there and you manage to kill those terrible things, what then?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’ll follow them into the swamp.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Fisher quieted. His bent hands tried stringing new line onto his lure-rod, wicking lengths of silvery, tensile wire into the feed-hoops and up out the top of the rod. After a moment of listening to the fire at their toes crack like buckshot, he spoke up once more. “Those are the Pythoan Marshlands. Before the time of my father’s father’s forefather, they’ve been a cursed place. No fishers go in there. The evils of the Dark Lords permeated their way into the trees, their roots, into the waters and what dwells there below. It doesn’t matter if it’s all being devoured by winter: there’s blackness biding in the roots.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shifted up from his seat, dusting off snow-crystals accumulating around the collar binding down his hood-cowl. With one hand, he quickly set a whetstone over the off-coloured alloys edging his longblade. “Out there’s where monsters have made their den and are setting to lair for the cold’s duration. Hythe Park is just a stone’s throne away, and all the food they’ll ever need. All the murder they’ll ever want.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I thought so too. There are differences, to be sure, between the wolf who’s just hungry, and the beasts who can only slake their thirst with living blood, devouring hearts for strength, enacting all kinds of… Perverse… Preserve me…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad saw it too: shapes in the dying twilight were beginning to push aside thin soft-wood trees and thick, snow-caked shrubberies, coming out onto the ice-river. Seroth counted as many as a sure dozen, each standing atop powerful legs, shoulders wreathed in capes made from human skin. Their eyes, bright, wide, glowed like dead novas in the murk of wind and snow-sheets constantly raining down from blackened and bruised grey skies. Quite suddenly a howling of screaming air came rushing down from the presumed north. Seroth checked the ride of his harnesses, laid aside his cloak save for his hood-cowl. The Fisher was rapidly untangling his lure-rod and stowing it away, gripping his old hand-augur like a makeshift dirk.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’d high tail it iffen I were you, boy,” He said. Then he rose on whining knees and trundled out of the stall, hurriedly limping back up through Scale Mile to the protection offered by Hythe Park’s Heartland. Seroth watched him for a moment before he disappeared amidst the left-over stilt-houses. He tested the balanced sword resting with eager wait in his gloved palms. Baying calls reached him from across the shore. Seroth jerked his left gauntlet, checking with satisfaction as a long, hidden knife snapped into his hand before retreating back into the housing-case. Embers swirled around his boots as they trampled the fire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Behind him, the sun peered through the soot-stacks and rowed hab-spires of Hythe Park as just a grey suggestion of dampening light. Seroth walked out from the frozen shoreline onto the glacier-river proper, sword drawn and idling by his hip and thigh, bouncing with each given step. Water was still running beneath the shrouded ice-bergs looming all around; it buckled deep throbs of cracking sound, like a too-heavy musical sound. There wasn’t anything else like it to describe it against: the wail of thickening cracks in tens of meters thick ice beneath his cleat-boots. Winds calling down from the north continued screaming in his ears, enough so Seroth drew up a scarf across his jaw and nose. Hot vapors of breath escaped him in brief clouds. Just ahead, by two hundred paces on, lumbered the Sithspawn emerging for their nightly hunt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He watched one outline stand aright on its hind-quarters and draw great, hoarse gasps from the air. The wind was turning their odorous musk the lad’s way, unnaturally pungent with ripe, earthy waste. However, the airs were fickle and game for chance and cruelty. Currents shifted over Seroth’s shoulders and scattered the smell of his skin-oils, sweat, and breath down river at the Spawn. The one sniffing and hucking about froze on the spot; its shadow hinted at a sharp face mounted against a meaty, supine throat with great flexibility. Its frame shivered, tensing under anticipation. At its howl, the hunting pack halted in their strides and turned to follow its gesture. Dead-nova eyes backlit by hot appetites and ingrained capacities for unnatural barbarism looked Seroth’s way in the storm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Two hundred paces, Seroth guessed. Judging by their capacity for unbridled speed, he likewise guessed they’d clear the distance in under a handful of seconds. Seroth gave them their needed goad striding forward against the wind-howls, frost gathering on the leather of his shoulder pads. Rosa Mazhar’s obsidian-gold ring hung like a charm around his throat. The lad recalled the memories of her kisses and laughter, fixed on his scarf-mask a little tighter, and ran at the pack. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]He was wrong. They took less than a handful. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The twelve monsters shrugged their feet into the snow and ran. Seroth could hear the ice underfoot vibrating from sheer galloping weight. In a clear of glacier by his toes, he watched fresh, teal cracks sprout like tree rooting. They made no whooping battle-cries or announcements in Mandoa. They breathed and bulged out their barrel chests, slamming down clawed-hands like makeshift clubs. Seroth dodged away, leaving vaulting explosions of white and ice-glass where he stood prior. He could smell their rancid breath and feel their wet heat curling ice-flakes into dripping water against his long-sleeved tunic. The vibrosword in his hands awoke as he charged on the hilt-battery, running and parrying as he tried to direct the melee.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was not Ajax. He possessed none of that man’s granite-shattering strength, speed, or pure killing ability. The lad kept sprinting, weaving a tight semi-circle about the creatures. As their frames pressed together trying to steer around to land a slash across his flank, combined bulk foiled their movements. Legs tangled, arms locked and swatted across skull-pates, growling in flailing frustration. Outlier monsters were as yet a vicious priority. Seroth ducked under a swing that could have taken off his head and shoulders. His counter followed the arm back in and stung blood out of cuts made at the armpit and elbow. He drove the beast back into the snarling crowd, then took it with a harrying cut off its right shoulder to hip. A straight, shivering blow. Its arm, shards of collarbone, ribs, lungs, colon, and a great deal of blood hosed onto the river.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth backstepped, slapping his blade against six separate beasts and their bi-form arm-swords and six-inch claws. Another charged at his back and swung, marking three long slashes that opened up the skin across the lad’s spine. The lad howled, rolling and leaving slicks of blood on the river-ice, leaping up into a hop and swinging. A second beast took the diagonal slit across its scale-throat. It clutched its hands over the wound, drowning in its own ichor and bile. Seroth came around, kicking his toe into a back-leg to vault and stand atop its shoulders. Out flicked a hidden knife. He grunted, driving the steel down through the skull cap to wrench open a hole. Out flung brain chunks, bone, and further courses of blood. By now Seroth was coated in hot washes of black fluid drenching him down his pant legs and boots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Visibility was gradually worsening. He stopped a blow, barely, to his stomach and reversed his gripping on the hilt, wicking the offending wrist open to the bone. The monster loosed a trembling growl he could feel curdling the stomach acids roiling in his own belly. Seroth killed it with a hacking chop to the hide, bone, and meat of its heart. By now, the ache in his arms was intensifying. Sithspawn skin was hardy against the blade, blaster bolts, purportedly even against direct thermal-det blasts. He’d only a vibrosword and durasteel weaponry. Personal training and a distrustful ethos of Force power taught him against reliance on esoteric arts to reinforce his skills: he’d no refreshing techniques, outside of caf-drinks and electrolyte stim-shots. Seroth jerked such a hypodermic applicator from his belt and jacked the needle into his shoulder. Cool stimulant rushed down into his palm and fingers. A shadow fell over his vision. Seroth looked up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Two seconds. He’d lost consciousness for an abrupt two full seconds. Impacting against a tall drift of hard snow build-up woke him up from further darkness. Seroth could not recall exactly what flailed into his face and jaw, scattering him back up the river. When he flexed his right hand there wasn’t an ergonomic grip-hilt waiting for him. Seroth looked up and saw his vibrosword stuck in the glacial river some six meters away. Cruel monsters hemmed around it, dashing madly at his prone form. He unhooked axe and knife, laying in against ten bodies trying to crush-slam him back into the ice. Seroth gutted one through the soft of its groin, its hip, wedging the back-spike of his stomach up its jaw and tugging the appendage out from its face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now there were nine to kill. Impacts shivered up his forearms from blocked strikes impacting on the wroshyr wood axe-haft. The wood actually began splintering. Seroth fought his way in a circle of milling monsters snapping tusks, fangs, their blunt and broad teeth at his face. He buried the length of his sheathe-knife through one unguarded belly, roaring out a reaving howl. It was that night on the plateau face of Contruum’s Mount of the Blade. It was the stinging cold and frost, watching his mother try to kill him a hundred times in as many moves, bashing him open with wound after wound. Seroth kept his grip on the knife stuck in through the monster, bodily lifting it off from its haunches and viciously body-slamming it spine-down into the ice. Glacial, frozen water cracked in bursts of white-on-white crystals. He killed it, snapping his heel across its throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He reminded himself in a flash-thought that it wasn’t Contruum. Guenyvhar Gunn was laid to rest in her frozen grave, overlooking what remained of Contruum’s frozen arboreal forests. She wasn’t here and she could not haunt him. The vibrosword was in reach. Seroth turned and stoved in a skull with his breaking axe, snapping the axe-head off in the stuck bone, just plunging the shattered handle in through the beast’s throat and out its cradling vertebrae. He kicked the monster aside and retrieved his sword. Its hilt battery-pack sang energy into its edge and sterling peak as he wrenched it from the ice, showering half-melted water into the eyes of three monsters brawling in too close. How they howled, trying to scrape scalping fluid out of their eyeballs and tearducts. Seroth wove in, disemboweling the first, cutting the second through his ankles, knees, and waist, leaving a scrabbling torso to die in the churning snow-melt underfoot. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The third just managed to clear enough of its vision. Seroth leapt and plunged the whole of his sheathe-knife into its tender sclera, through the broad, carmine lens affording it excellent night-sight. Sloughing gore off his implement, the lad turned and detailed a quick count. Five. Five monsters, shivering with heat rising off bare hides, unbothered by the plummeting, shivering temperatures. Even against the coming dark, he could see them; too large, eyes too wide and murder-bright, clacking talons and claws together, warping the air with their warm temperature bleed. Seroth felt the ache return in his arms. Lungs burned, the sweat on his brow was going to inevitably freeze and harden, marking each encounter with the creatures of damnation as true fights for his life. …The lad was smiling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Around him, the beasts took up a five-pointed star enclosed about his flanks. Each was waiting on some unknowable signal. Seroth sheathed his knife, cocked his sword up in guard across his shoulder and hip, waiting for their move. The hide… It was thin around the clavicle, throat, and armpit. One of the beats blinked at him. Time slowed down. All five creatures rushed him in a simultaneous flash of swinging forearm-swords, talons, and knuckle-clubs. His longsword flashed. In five curt blows that were impossible to follow, Seroth whirled and cut his way through their death-clinch. Five heads and as many arms flew free to deposit upon the river-glacier, leaking out putrid gore-essences. Their bodies simply collapsed, twitching. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stood alone in the cold and dark, by himself to survey his handiwork. Now he could feel the north wind biting into the skin around his eyes and throat, throwing up caustic aches in his knees. Trees blasted leaf-less rustled not so far off in their frozen berths of permafrost earth and thrones of scaling snow. Distantly, lights blinked and spun in Hythe Park. The Heartland never slept; even from so far away as Scale Mile, he could make out the details of individual bodies suspended on outside scaffolding. They were busily fitting on insulated siding to help ward out the winter. He was busily trying to mend repairs to his torn heat-gown beneath his tunic and pants himself, trying to stay alive and one step ahead in this hunt for the spawn. Twelve lay dead. Snow and time would claim them. Seroth didn’t have the patience to wait so long. He strolled over each corpse, one by one, and planted magnesium torches into their wounds. They lit up like a spark across gasoline, burning brightly with high stacks of acrid, pluming smoke.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Sounds made his ears twitch. Seroth paused himself and looked at the far west mangrove bank. A curious pattern of crunching ice-drifts and snapping tree-boughs had thrown up a sort of gruff typewriter chime in his hearing. That he could interpret it over the wind howl bespoke its proximity. Seroth jammed a second refresher needle into his collarbone, tensing for whatever else decided to come out on this night. Two bright moons, pale as silver chalk, glared down in huge, luminous orbs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]What came out of the groves was nine feet tall, as broad as two and a half men at its chest, standing atop legs thicker than most tree trunks and arms bulked with durasteel muscle. All beneath a wrap of thick, coarse, dark fur running from digitigrade feet up to a long, blunt snout. Tufts of whitening hairs sprouted behind triangular ears. Rows of yellow fangs lined its maw, jutting over thin, scarred lips. Once, Seroth reckoned, it had been a Shistavanen Wolfman. Now, it was a lycanthrope born from fever dreams. It broke through copses of trees like a club through tinder branches, not even swatting its gargantuan arms out, simply striding. Lengths of half-frozen creeper vines were strung across its torso, make-shift bandoleers, looped through skulls bleached of flesh. They rattled and knocked together in awful dins. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then it spoke once, through throaty snarls burning stinking breath over its long, pink tongue. His voice was like razors over brass drums. “Hhghgggnnn… What bastard masters sent for you, hhrrggnnn? What did they promise you? I want to know: how much coin for my head? …You won’t say? Hhhrrgggnnnn, it doesn’t matter. I will turn every bone along your spine into putty in my paws. You will howl for the end, little hunter. To no avail. There’s no mercy for you. Not yet. We need you to tell a story!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The beast came on. Seroth though its sheer, inhuman size would slow him on the ice and buy him time enough to outmaneuver the Wolfman. He was a blur of fury hide and claws half as long as the lad’s forearm. The wolfman curled a fist up, shooting a blow that bowled Seroth up into the air off his feet. He turned over his head twice before he managed to arrest his disorientation. Despite feeling lancing pain writhe up from his battered stomach, and the turn-around of confusing blood-rush echoing inside his ears, he braced and made a landing. As his cleats slammed into the snow, threatening to dislocate every piece of connective tissue from his ankles to his tail-bone, Seroth cut forward. His longsword met into the Wolfman’s paw, managing a short scatter of meat and blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He saw his opponent was not impressed of his reminder of mortality. Claws sharper than corn-scythes stroked in long under-swings aiming for his groin. The lad backstepped, rolled, rolled again and vaulted out of reach before sticking his footing and rolling past the Wolfman’s right ankle. He barely avoided being trampled. Seroth stalled onto a knee, jerking around and cutting with the turn, left-right. The vibrosword managed to knick into its heel-skin. More blood and fur staining a little rivulet onto the glacial river. It was enough to back the Wolfman off. Dark eyes had turned from off-brown to venomous, reptilian yellow. Not gold as Ajax’s had been, but sickly and cyst-like. He was smiling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good, hhhrrrggnnn…” Snarled the Wolfman. “Good, don’t fail on me yet. Make the task worth its challenge. I want a fight worth fighting, before I devour your bones and their marrow. Come on. Bastard hunter. Bring your steel. We hunt!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth watched the Wolfman turn on his heel and give a mighty vault. It carried him up over the very tips of the mangrove forest bending with snow drifts upon their naked bark, out of sight where just a crash of crumbling silt-earth and snapping wood hailed his landing. He was a vision of the sheer scale of difficulty that the lad was charged to surmount, and conquer. His speech was confusion. A task worth its challenge? Wanting, no, needing a story from him? The fact alone that he could speak told of formidable resources invested in the Wolfman’s creation. Every monster encountered was dumb to everything but its murderous need for blood, flesh, and pain. The Wolfman was their champion: cannibalistic hunger resplendent with the severed skulls of the victims he had personally seen to. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He retrieved his vibrosword back into its waiting recharge sheathe. Pale lances of moonbeams winked through breaks in stormy cloud-cover. Snow was falling again, picked up by ferocious winds still murmuring from the far northern axial. Ahead laid the Wolfman’s lair and stomping grounds: unending hectares of treacherous marshland half claimed by Dromund Kaas’ birthing ice age. He had months to familiarize himself with the general set of the landscape, memorize and record whatever hideaways large enough to accommodate his massive, bestial size. The Wolfman wouldn’t be alone. The cold would not have claimed all of the swamplands myriad predators, evolved to take advantage of the saline waters, confusing undertows and poor visibility.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The west swamps invited the lad to try his hand at doom. Seroth set his jaw and bit into a length of salted jerky retrieved from his belt, walking forward up a frozen, mossy inlet. The Wolfman wouldn’t get away. A thousand lost souls haunting Hythe Park wouldn’t accept anything short of vengeance for their unfair deaths. Seroth ducked beneath an awning of thin branch-work and entered a storied hell of half moonlight, drifting curtains of snowfall, deep shadows, and endless rustles of bewitching wind.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Every third footfall was treacherous. Soggy patches of silt-earth still retained measures of warmth, refusing to freeze, harden, leading to Seroth nearly tumbling as his foot and leg were sucked up to the hip. Discipline snapped his jaws closed from cussing aloud; sound had curious ways to echo amidst the white mangrove trees, buttonwood, the sour-apple palms bobbing fruit lacquered by frost. His hand rested over the spine of a dead, spade-faced reptile slowly having its corpse pinched by the cold. Swampland ordinarily teamed with fauna that impressively kept out of sight unless attentive eyes checked for details showing their passage. Seroth wondered if the shock of climate change, coupled with orbital cannon-fire, caused an exodus of inhabitant creatures. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a shallow pond caked into a hard convex bowl. Venturing close, trying to focus his nightvision, the lad noticed a three dozen bird corpses lying broken and leg-up. Small, scaly three-clawed toes protruded, scattering moonlight off frost-crystals etched into the shrinking skin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth’s Wolfman laid out his trail obviously and with contempt. Despite what the lad had seen of his speed and probable agility, it wasn’t long before he encountered tall mangrove trees either bent or snapped in half. Cold was slowly petrifying the wood: impact exploded the tree trunks out like they’d faced a concussive force. Long, broad footprints cratered in through snow, into the silt-earth below, making a meandering path leading deeper on into the swampland. Soon, the lad unsheathed his vibrosword, hummed on the pommel-battery, and began cutting a swath through tenting copses and spiky shrubbery foiling his way.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~Beep-Beep!~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He did curse then. The lad ducked onto a knee, cussing vilely beneath his breath. Someone was trying to raise him on his comm. piece and the blipping ring jarred his tensed nerves. Seroth clipped off his belt and raised the small mic and speaker up to his lips. A small holo-display lit up and gently scoured light into his face; the caller ID was [UNKNOWN]. The lad half expected a mocking call from the beast somewhere deeper in the mangroves. Seroth depressed a small switch to receive and gruffly toned his voice deep into whispers. “Yes…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Young wolf!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blinked. “Ajax?” He murmured, standing up, cautiously checking over grim moonbeams just barely lighting up the darkness at his flanks. “…How did you get my frequency?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“From the Commander! Ahh, Miss Boudica, was it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And how did she exactly obtain it?” The lad wrinkled his brow, carefully strolling forward on a long animal trail glistening with ice, swatting small trees out of his way with sword-whacks. “How do you know her? Were you contracted as well?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Unimportant! Now tell me of your hunt. I hunger for progress other than my own.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth ducked beneath a shimmering curtain of snow-waddled moss. He gripped onto a still loose strand of thick vine growth, leaping and swinging over a deep culvert-ditch solidified with water. “I found a beast. He’s massive, Ajax. A Shistavanen, before he was changed. An absolute killer.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, an apex creature. Maybe even an alpha controller of the lesser beasts.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, and he could speak.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sentience? In an out-and-out killer? Time and care was undoubtedly spent in his transformation. Do not let his ability for intelligence and speech fool you: if he’s retained sentience than it is for some darker work.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I won’t,” Seroth grunted, traversing a prickly thicket. “He attacked me anyway, and had trophies of human kills.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What else could you glean?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He’s not a local, that’s for sure. I spent some time in Hythe Park, listening for rumour and leads, and he doesn’t share a Kaas accent. He’s responsible for a great deal of bedlam and murder, but he spoke to me, Ajax. Mentioned a ‘we’. The beast isn’t here killing on his own.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You believe someone has set him loose to cause strife. I think it so as well. Curious, very curious, young wolf. You’re rooting in very convoluted work, my friend.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He also said something about ‘needing’ something from me,” Seroth replied, pausing beneath the bough-arms of a tall, black-barked sycamore. “Needing a story, paraphrasing. That portion I don’t understand.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…A story?” Ajax said after a brief pause. “Tell me again, my friend, where are you precisely?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I,” Seroth shifted out from cover and returned to following the Wolfman’s broad paw strokes in the mud and snow. “Am west of Hythe Park and a locale called the Scale Mile. The beast’s gone into the swamplands and he intends to have me follow. I’ve gone after him, though there’s no telling where he means to lead me. He’s thirsty for some confrontation, Ajax. He wants to brag murder in my face before he tries to cripple me. The beast doesn’t want me dead…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I will come. Young wolf, you are striding into a cavern of shadows and mirrors. Tricks of distortion will try to warp your sense of perspective. Do not let the beast, or anything else, shirk your purpose. He has not killed out of some tragic tale of self-defense or for a just cause. He is a murderer. The beast has slaughtered, devoured, and leads a pack of less mindful creatures to enact evil on anything in his path.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Be safe, young wolf,” Ajax clipped through the mic, before closing the channel.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth hid away the comm., redressed the clips in his calve-boots and kept walking. Ahead, the monstrous Shistavanen laid out an unhurried path that stroked swaths through swamp debris, bracken, and other swampland waste. The environ was extremely perplexing. Seroth wondered if he’d be interviewed by weather researchers and experts in differing biomes what it was like to walk abreast two entirely different geographical climes: marsh and insidiously encroaching winter that would blast its frailty into tundra. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ordinarily, there’d be a midnight symphony of insects, moss-falcons, sedo-owls, snakes, gila beasts, and other animals tuning a raucous of animal song. Nothing. Insectoid life, regionally, had evolved in a constant fumigated breath of heat and moisture. Checking his chronowatch readings, it was lowering past twenty-five degrees centigrade. Shock of asteroid planet-fall, atmospheric debris, and sheer dropping temperatures had killed out most bugs. Seroth encountered further animal graves lightly sprinkling with snow. There were vast fields of fallen mammals and reptilian, most draped over bunched roots curving up from the soil. Some were truly impressive specimens, like five meter long alligators that walked on six, truncated legs and had maws wide enough to devour an Ithorian whole. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One alligator-dragon was still alive, but just. Seroth could hear it breathing raggedly. Venturing over a make-shift bridge of slippery logs, he strolled up to the creature. It was wallowing in a widening stain of red snow. Something with its own massive set of jaws had bit into its flanks, devouring a gullet’s worth of meat harvested out of its gut. Freeze weakened the alligator from mounting a defense. He found it sputtering on bloody phlegm, bleeding catastrophically out of traumatized and irreparably savaged organs. It did not seem to mind the naked hand lending a little warmth to its snout; Seroth had knelt and stripped off a glove, rubbing along its long nose. Slit eyes watched him, unblinking. Alike as Ajax’s, that they were not human yet glowed with some primordial ‘knowing’. A long tremor wove its way up from tail to its jutting teeth. The alligator eased out a long death rattle and then stilled forever. Seroth replaced on his glove, resuming cutting his way through the undergrowth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Trailing the beast took hours. His chronowatch told that it was soon approaching daybreak, but the sky was unyielding. Seroth could not detect hints of anything beyond natural ambience in the layers of dim light. It lent a strange, blue lambency to every object, giving off the impression that every tree and long field of glassy ice and snow was lit from within. The bush progressively worsened; Seroth spent a half-hour navigating a quarter mile navigating stretches of solid-frozen swamp water. Care was taken to miss tripping over crowds of salt grass stiffly crackling under his boot. Despite a sense of surveillance, precious little came out to challenge his passage. Every once in a while, he swore he could hear traces of hot breathing above in the branches. Looking yielded nothing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A sense of entrapment worsened. An hour past dawn was when events began to quicken. Seroth heard clamours of bodily crunching and breathless panting charging through the marsh undergrowth. He sought out a brutal shape cavorting on the edges of his vision, huffing growls, hocking spittle from blubbery lips and yellow fangs. The Wolfman. It ran up a jutting piece of jagged rock looking out of place in the gloom and stood framed by fading moonlight. Loosened howls reverberated so deeply, Seroth could feel it shuddering through his lungs. It was gone again, leaping onto a broad birch, heaving it down off its roots by pure strength and weight leverage. His sword-edge glowed with ultra-vibration. Seroth ran on, the trail fresh, purpose renewed in his limbs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He imagined the five hundred pictographs of poor souls missing from their families in Kaille Ward. Hundreds of parents, siblings, friends, lovers that were flailed in their very beds. Or worse, dragged to their deaths out in the cold swamps, screaming as jaws killed them in the dark. Seroth didn’t pretend every cause was iron-clad. He knew doubt. It ached in his heart everyday. Yet no soul was perfect and very few deserved to die like that. The lad stole up the rock-jut, leaping onto the swilling birch trunk milling in the broken ice and snow, hot after the Shistavanen. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With quick suddenness, marshland gave way to a deep clearing. Seroth spied blankets of rust-flaked razor wire poking up from several feet worth of snow yield. Marsh habitation very rarely allowed natural formations of pristine, leveled flatland without stirring up the enclosure with mangrove roots and forest copses. There was a gentle fragrance of salty chemical vapor in the air. Beneath his souls, the land had been ‘bleached’ to prevent moss, lichen, or any sort of growth. In the clearing’s exact midst rose a pylon-squared building of steel girders and scaffolding, ferrocrete and duranium portholes and arc-lamp towers long dead of power. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An abandoned outpost. Hundreds of tracks ran to and fro across the grounds, even trampling the wires. This was where monsters and the makings of nightmares held camp. It was a perfect den. Like an iceberg, Sith construction protocols dictated that only ten percent of an outpost’s structure could be exposed. The rest of the facility was packed below ground, in lightless tunnels and facilities, where prowled his quarry. Further questions began warming Seroth’s mind. In the vast marsh waste, how did the creatures come to find this place? Hythe Park’s woes in dealing with Sithspawn seemed less and less like an accident of tragedy and more on the lines of a brooding conspiracy. Going in was a trap, obviously. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So obviously, Seroth decided to spring it. He fixed on his headband and clipped a head-lamp to a spot behind his temple. Light washed the clearing in a crisp, long illumination cone. With sword still drawn, he quietly picked his way through the clearing, taking care to step over half-devoured remnants of ‘food’ dragged in by the predators. He’d slain a dozen at the Scale Mile. Looking up at the outpost, there was no proper telling how many more could be lairing inside. Paw and foot-tracks were scattered; he could only make sense of a few tentative numbers. Wafting stinks of spent animal spoor and urine crept up at him from melts in the snow. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Entry was gained by one durasteel porthole door pried off its hinges. Its metal jamb was laced with icicles. Seroth knocked them loose with his shoulders while stepping inside, after climbing up a step of grail-floors and bent hand-rails. The interior was blackness overlaid across destroyed work stations, so much debris that he’d do nothing else but track sound with every step. Seroth walked in through the doorway with his sword raised at the fore, listening to the Wolfman echoing distant chuckles through the long corridors.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]At first was the overwhelming odour of human putrification. Seroth stepped through the hatch-door and into a grotesque mausoleum. If anyone waiting for inevitable, terrible news back in Hythe Park held any doubts, the sight of blood dripping from slathers upon the ceiling would be the dispelling truth. The lad had to stop, force his gut not to roil and fling vomit past his teeth. Inquisitiveness kept up a small question in the back of his mind: where had the five hundred missing persons from the Heartland gotten to? He’d little doubt they were dead. The beasts were not accustomed to understand mercy. Yet there were no bone yards, save for frozen crusts of blood stuck to tree bark and patches of snow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stepped into the coat-room. It had been little better than an abattoir. From the small ancillary chamber out into a wider observation deck and hallways beyond, bodies had been left piled on the ground. They were laid in stacks three-torsos thick, all but carpeting the whole decking. The lad steeled his soul, gripped onto his sword tightly, gingerly beginning the process of navigating the carnage. There could be no doubt about the nature of the evil facing him now. No doubt at all. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a display of esoteric malice atop of the almost ordinary macabre violence, Seroth noted. Each wall was splashed with long, dried streaks of blood painted out into symbols that almost wriggled when looked upon. Some sort of black speech; Sith spellcraft maybe, long sentences wheeling around into tight, concentric lines detailing curses and maledictions. Beside the glyphs were roughly detailed figures. The Shistavanen or the monsters, doubtless under direction, had taken split bones and used their jagged edges to sharply carve etchings of tall ghouls into the bulkhead. Their poses were arranged in crude scenes. Seroth interpreted a theme of sacrifice, and the glory-revel of shed blood. As he stepped, a bloated thigh under his toes wheezed a loud, ungainly fart of methane. The stench was brutal; he slapped a hand over his nose and kept maneuvering over the corpses.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]From deep within the outpost complex came rippling laughter echoing up the hallways. Seroth paused before a hatchway, peering his head-lamp down into the shadows. Silence followed quick on the chuckle’s heels. He looked for any wall-mounted maps, floor-by-floor safety cross-sections, to get a hold of his position. Deep, ugly welts and tears in the rusting metal told the maps were long gone. His boot-toes pushed through their remnants, shredded into long plastic strips and fading print-ink. This was their home. He: their intruder. The lad hadn’t yet penetrated the lower quarters and felt his imagination pique at what horrors the Wolfman and this damned brood in his keeping had busied themselves constructing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Luckily, the corridor descended, leveling off on broad platforms each time he traversed down past a floor. Ambient light was virtually zero: only the headlamp pierced the moldy gloom sprinkled with still must and dirt in the air. Something plinked off his brow. Seroth paused, stepping back and looking up at the ceiling. Another effort to keep from exclaiming aloud ensued, though he hissed breath up his nose and turned grey. Hands and arms hung from the grille-plates shadowing structure rafters up in the hallway ceiling. Lengths of electric-wiring were dug into the decaying meat and bone, holding them high aloft where they hung still. More indecipherable messages in blood and shard-etched cartoon-glyphs were stamped into the bulkheads. Turning, looking as far down as his headlamp could illuminate, Seroth could see a tremor of light peering round a distant, distant corner.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Coming to the bottom while ducking under the dangling appendages brought him to broad, taller passageway lit by red emergency lamps. Seroth counted eight floor he passed and knew he was at least a score-worth of meters below ground. There was an impression of unseen weight pressing in, adding to the oppressive and haunting atmosphere caked in corpse-gore. Unnerving was the lack of challenge. No monsters, no creeps, nothing like that bulky Wolfman came out of the shadows for him. But he was being observed. There were occasional skitters. Sounds of motion, dislocated but close, that had no explanation. More than once he swore he could hear whispers issuing from floor-level entry-hatches speaking in an unknown language. Once, he turned to look down a long corridor; a shape just out of focus paused, then slinked out of sight.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hrrrgggnnn…!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth heard the Wolfman’s long haggard of breath. In his stretch of corridor, about to enter into what must have been the sub-basement, there was little cover to hide. He pressed his back to a portion of flat bulkheads, carefully pressing on. Steel-toed boots lightly stole over grille-floor; bundles of sheathed fiber-wire ran up and down the length, sometimes cascading travelling breeches of sparks. Now the light he’d sighted distantly was ramping up its lambent glow. He killed his headlamp, stowed it away in his belt-harness and kept stepping forward. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They all confessed a thousand times, before I tore into their skulls,” Said the Wolfman, speaking to the lad through hollow echoes in the ventilation ducts. “You humans… You keep so much on your consciences! It suffocates you! I saw their truth, hunter! Violence! It’s the answer staring you lot in the soul, but you cling to codes! What’s your code, hunter? Tell me… Tell me, and then I’ll break you…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A worn copper plaque installed on a rib in the ceiling told Seroth he was inching close towards the outposts sub-basement holding cells. He suspected the outpost served dual purposes: maybe a ‘training house’ for the scout corps, as well as a simultaneous prison for deserters, political dissidents, and others who absolutely had to disappear into the out-city marshlands. The way forward into the cell-wing, however, was barred. So far below surface temperatures, where freezing plummets of scoring wind and snow pummeled silt-earth into permafrost, the under-levels enjoyed insulated warmth. Moisture beaded on the riveted wall-plates, dripping to off rhythms onto the flooring, Seroth now stepping through ankle deep puddles of oily residue. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead were buckled lengths of walling fallen prey to unceasing pressures levered by tree-roots thirsting for water in the under-earth. One long tendril of scarred bark and pale wood had split through the bulkhead and grille-floor, upsetting the inlaid plumbing, peeling up grille-plates, letting snapped wires wind around the twist of its girth. Seroth stood at the lip of a noticeable sink in the hallway; a darkly lit, almost depthless pond of too-blue water softly lapped over the durasteel edge onto his boots. Tell-tale light peered up from the soggy murk. Passage through the pond-dip was possible, on the way to the waiting cell-blocks, despite a risk of errant root-branches ensnaring and drowning the lad if he attempted a swim.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was little for it. Clawed striations in the peeling steel by his head and shoulders demonstrated the beast regularly braved the pond on his way up to the surface floors. Seroth sheathed his longsword, tied off its power-pack nestled in the pommel, bracing for the inevitable shock of cold. He stepped back by a half-pace, then hopped shortly and plunged down through the air. Freezing water swallowed him up from boot-ankle to brow. Seroth snapped his eyes open to try and see through the mire of dirty particle curtains. Sundered logs floated past him with eerie weightlessness. Something with force had clubbed its way forward through the root system, jarring open a barely cylindrical passage. Seroth swam onward, kicking his powerful legs against the freezing water. Air bubbles leaked out the sides of his mouth, out from his nostrils. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He counted the seconds in his thoughts. At a hundred seventy eight seconds, almost three minutes, he surfaced upon the other side into harsh glares of ceiling lamps. Gutted emergency power generators were barely managing to supply enough electric charge to light the glow-lamps flickering on the walls. Seroth climbed out of the water, tugging himself up onto a section of flooring slippery with reddish sludge. He snorted, clearing his nose of acrid water. A boggy, methane scent of the still water tainted his sense of smell. Seroth unshackled his longsword, keying on its power-pack. Lightning and corposant glowed along its razor edge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Do not let the beast, or anything else, shirk your purpose. Ajax’s earnest advice rang potently in the lad’s thoughts the closer he approached a tall, floor-stacked chamber. The Woflman had admittedly unnerved him. Facing creatures that had mind enough only to bay aloud before trying their luck on his blade was one thing. He’d never encountered something quite in the shape or make as the Shistavanen. That one’s mind was subsumed by murder-lust. To him, violence was the only worthwhile currency to slave for. But he’d seen the Fallannassi frescoes on Pydyr, and spent sporting company with [member="Jaxton Ravos"], romancing [member="Rosa Mazhar"] on those long Ardan nights. Despite squalor, crowded spaces, staring up at red dawns laced with the ashes of the dead, surely those slain dreamed of one day seeing stars behind Dromund Kaas’ two moons. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So, hunter,” Growled the phlegmatic, hoarse baritone. The Wolfman was set somewhere in a dark spot in the wide prison atrium. Floored terraces constructed of soldered iron bars stretched upward by six floors. Things with sword-claws and whip-tails stood astride the guard-rails, gargoyle with their set, fierce expressions and pointed snouts. “What’s your code?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth remembered the visages of the dead. He slowly turned around on his spot dead-center in the atrium floor, sword raised to address each and every shadow. “To fight things like you. To save those you’d prey on. Give vengeance to the dead you’ve taken. To try and make the galaxy a little safer, monster corpse by monster corpse.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Figures.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman swung down with ape-like grace from his spying perch some three floors above. Seroth felt the decking underneath his boots shake and rattle. Under barred light spun from idling swinging glow-lamps overhead, the ferocious bulk and gait of the Shistavanen was that much more incredible. That much more cowing. Victim by victim, he towered across the kidnapped, monologuing tripe about base natures and dichotomies between himself and them. The lad had crossed five hundred smashed bodies, floor by floor, left to rot. The Wolfman blinked as she saw something light behind the boy’s eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A kind of rage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Figures you’d take the side of the dead over what the living have to say,” Said the Wolfman, pounding over his barrel chest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What do you have to say, Thing?” Seroth called back, strolling forward a pace. Behind, Sithspawn emerged from the open cells and began landing to encircle him. One by one by one. “’Low, I stared into the heart of darkness and so became darkness’? Is that it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hhhnnngggg… Huh,” Snorted the Wolfman. “It sounds like your mind’s made up. …You wanna kill me, don’t you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad furled his grip tighter on his blade-hilt. “You and your coven dragged half a thousand people out into the swamp. One by one, you killed them. You ate them. With no reason then because you needed to hurt them. They didn’t deserve that.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh, just let me go, I’ll mend my ways. Promise,” The Shistavanen mocked. He raised his left paw and swung it forward. At his signal, black-garbed shapes that were thoroughly unchanged compared to the Sithspawn materialized behind his bent flanks. Seroth eyed them: tall, built, dressed in silk jumpsuits that shimmered some fabric that foiled away light, girded in black leather cuirasses, pauldrons, gauntlets, and boots. Affixed to their faces were steely rebreather-masks, lensed with red eye-pieces almost swirling with carmine smoke. Some were armed with force-pikes, others long phrik staffs ending in edged blades, more with one-handed swords, dirks, energy bucklers, daggers, and crop-scythes. All weapons showcasing immaculate craftsmanship, tenuous upkeep, and gleaming sharpness. Seroth cocked up his sword enguard.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]This was bad. The trap was sprung.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But you know. It wasn’t without reason.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked up at the snouted-face, into eyes gleaming pure malice, violence-lust, and a will to dominate all in his path. “I was told to,” Said the beast. He looked up, craning his trunk-neck around. “Cassat! The witcher is ours!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is he now?” Came a thin, spidery, dulcet voice. One previously inactive track-cam woke up. On blinked a green, tell-tale battery light, swinging around. It was installed atop a support-pillar overlooking the atrium courtyard and spanning up into the rocky ceiling. Seroth fancied he could hear the micro-lenses panning, zooming, framing his portrait before running clean up software to sharpen the image. “Hmmmn, I’d say ‘So soon’ but given we’ve been laboring for a damn cycle last seven weeks, I don’t think… Huh?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The beast didn’t like the unsure pause. “…What, Cassat?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh,” Returned the voice. It began to lick up a hard undertone of disappointment: bitter and vile. “Oh. Ohhh, ohhh dear. Perfect. Fantastic effort, Harcress. Bloody wonderful. You dolt. You bastard. You idiot bastard, who can’t remember a simple gods-damned description!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What, Cassat?” Snorted ‘Harcress’, the Shistavanen. Seroth smiled grimly: he had a few names now. “You and the Lord said ‘Lure the hunter. He’ll be a loner, and a swordsman. Bait him.’ I did. Here he is. Surrounded and about to get pasted. What’s your deal, hhggggnnnn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. We did,” ‘Cassat’ replied. “But I’m staring at the pict shown to both you and I of what the hunter is supposed to appear as. I can tell you, beyond any doubt, Harcress: you have the wrong man.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No!” Bellowed Harcress.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes! You idiot!” Cassat roared back. “This isn’t the witcher, this is some fething idiot wandered in from the cold! We’ve just wasted I can’t recall how many of my pets to get this louse here! And he’s not the genuine article! Gods be damned!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Who are you?” Seroth spoke up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I?” The voice on the public speaker suddenly turned thoughtfully prideful. “I can tell you; on the promise that my partner Harcress here will shred you to pulp in just a moment. Sillian V. Cassat, young man, but you can call me: Black Vermillion.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Grey eyes lit up in growing alarm. “Ohhh, yes! Yes, yes! You know the name, no? Black Vermillion! The Scourer of Jabiim! The Fiend of Serenno! The Talos Madman! The Butcher of Antar! The universes’ single most celebrated portrait of mercenary refinement and alchemic ability. There you are: Black Vermillion. Now, Harcress?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman peered up at the track-cam.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kill him.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The PA system deadened in a wail of static. Seroth had made his count: a dozen spawned horrors beside nine assassin-killers with their beast-master. Twenty two bodies, if his math was correct. True or not, the outcome looked deathly certain. Gloating, Harcress leaned up on his massive legs and began stepping forward. His entourage of monsters and trained murderers took up his cue, rushing forward across the atrium brick-floor. Combined weight caused dust and loose mortar to heave in shaken clouds up from the ground, from the surrounding terrace pillars supporting their tonnage, from the blemished ceiling far overhead. The lad’s vibrosword hummed alertly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Violence was immediate, explosive, generating a disproportionately matched melee. Bulk shapes and slim shadows weaved in and slammed against the lad. Seroth felt over-sized limbs wrench into his chest like clubs, picking him off the ground and hurtling him bodily across the atrium. His back met a cell-gate. Somehow, the iron crumpled to contour his arched spine. Breath left the lad, as he fell onto his palms against the earth, longsword scattered out of reach. The beasts ran faster than the assassins, who loomed behind them like shadows of Death’s specters. One sped ahead of its pack to reach Seroth first. It lifted him up with one hand by the lad’s right wrist, wrenching back an arm to punch through his chest. Seroth grimaced and snapped the pivot blade hidden in his left gauntlet up into his hand. The knife smashed into the beast’s eye, through the cradle of bone behind it, into soft brain. Seroth was let go and he spun about, kicking his toes into his sword hilt, twisting his arm out to grip it as the blade turned over in the air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He wasn’t going to live to see grey dawn-light outside. On came the animals, the assassins, one moving with blistering physical ferocity, the latter gliding like smooth calipers over the stony floor. Behind them was Harcress, the Wolfman, chuckling and hurling insults. Seroth skittered left to meet the assassins, sword flashing in crisp, parrying strokes. The masked-fighters were fiends in mortal flesh. Seroth had never seen men or women address his slashes and hard cuts with as much deliberate, cold technique. He ducked a hack from a serrated hook aimed at his temples, dodging away as swift as his pace allowed, forced on a side-run that tried to sweep in close for Harcress. The Wolfman he could fight. His cyclopean size, reach, and strength meant the crowd would have to disengage. Or risk getting hewn to pieces trying to interfere. Either way, it meant only a single opponent for the lad to consider. The Shistavanen was responsible for hundreds now dead and slowly rotting in the upper outpost chambers. To say nothing of the possible thousands he may have slain in a dodgy ‘career’ extending to bestial murder and cannibalism beyond Dromund Kaas. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth checked an assassin stabbing for his loin and liver with two paired basket-hilt scimitars. He crossed his guard and blocked three killing swings aimed to sever arteries in his thigh, hip, and forearm. The assassin brought up his twin-blades trying to counter a slash for his chest; Seroth had feinted, stabbing below the raised X-cross into the mask and out the back of the assassin’s throat. He turned, flicking blood into the eyes of a rising monster and cutting it through the meat of its waist and spine. More gore showered, the beast scrabbling for its midriff as it fell away bisected. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Suddenly, a barrel chest wrought out of steel skin clothed in enormous tufts of bristly, ragged brown fur filled his vision. It was Harcress’ turn for sport. The Wolfman wound back one arm to strike, bowling over a half-dozen beasts with an unintentional back-hand, seething an open palm down for Seroth’s face. The lad never imagined anything so big could move quite so fast and deftly. Harcress missed: his hand punctured through rock and insulate cement beneath, ripping out a ragged hole strewn swiftly with chunks of pulverized debris. He came on at the lad again. Seroth stepped away, twirling his vibrosword about, trying to harry cuts into the Wolfman’s fist-sized knuckles to ward off his approach. It didn’t work, Harcress never seeming bothered as he began to bleed down his palm and wrist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He struck again, a curled in right hook. Seroth dropped and rolled back over his shoulders and neck, listening to air whistle through the beast’s massed hairs. Harcress’s blow swung right through a meter thick support column idling beneath an upper cell floor. The column served just to slow his momentum, as the Wolfman simply shrugged his arm through the ferrocrete. Slabs of shattered material broke and twisted out of the way of his fist. One jagged lump tossed too far and too fast, impacting into the face of an assassin failing to regard its arc. Seroth didn’t see her collapse dead, with rock still hanging in through the collapsed plating of her signature death-mask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Instead, he took note that Harcress was leaning too much into his missed hook-punch. One knee jutted out, poking through the Beast-Thing’s guard. Seroth dug his boot-toes into a catch of cobble and mortar, running forward and left past Harcress’ hip, smashing his blade edge left-down-right into the tender muscle behind the Wolfman’s knee-cap. Blood spurted from the deep, narrow wound ravine scored through the alchemized hide. Harcress cried out, half in pain and the other portion in surprise, clutching at his slowly wetting calve. His entourage came in then, battling Seroth out of his reach, pushing him under the shadow of an above floor ceiling. He was pinched into a recessed corner, forming a half-circle, impenetrable by walled bodies hemmed by edged limbs and weaponry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hacress’ mob waited on his word. The Wolfman was notorious for his unpredictable moods and contradicting fancies. He could slay the lot of them if they failed to showcase what he considered proper killing instinct, or break them apart if they acted past his consent. Harcress limped on his lamed paw, shaking his head through a wry expression curling up his snout in a long, enraged snarl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Owe you for that,” He growled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth reached and took out his long sheathe-knife, pairing it with his longsword. “Maybe. Come. Try and take your pound of flesh. I may not leave here alive, Harcress. But neither are you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was true. Fire or high water, if it cost him the better part of his vitality, Seroth was going to find some manner to put down the Wolfman and go to the Afterlife dragging him spiritedly to the Nine Hells. For his role in the Hythe Park killings, for whatever uncounted evils yet to confess, Harcress the Shistavanen was consigned to death. The idea didn’t please the Wolfman. Not at all. He drew himself up to his full height atop his good leg and swelled his chest out, gusting a throaty, loose roar berating Seroth’s ears with thumps of sub-sonic notes. Harcress gave the kill order; his paw swept out to command the crowd forward and rend the lad into gouts of uncountable pieces. Memory flashed Rosa’s smile just briefly into Seroth’s eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The worst regret to come to him in the moment, kicking off the wall with his boot, was that she had the worst luck in being smitten with a fool like him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Two monsters on the very farthest portion of the right flank paused trying to step forward and meet the lad’s blades. Something was not right. Inexplicably, the pair felt an unbearable agony writhe up the flesh of their shoulder muscle and through their ribs, listening to a soft, squelching sucks of flesh parting away as blood showered up to blind them. Agony fell away into cold numbness, as death took them and embraced their unwitting, tortured souls away. The whole of the slayer-guard stopped their advance and turned. Standing ankle deep in monstrous entrails, wet from his swim in the collapsed entry tunnel, Ajax tapped his silver sword against the cobble-stone.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I was told to say ‘Commander Boudica relays her regards,’” Ajax said. He smiled amicably. “There we are. Now, you all may die.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hell’s blazes, that’s the one!” Harcress paced back incredulously, eyeing the tall man, his slighter build, the wary ease of how he set his sword high enguard. “Kill the other one! But not him! Get that sword out of his hands and bring him to me!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Shistavanen made the assigned tasks seem like trifling easy matters. Kill the boy trapped in his corner, overpower the second man and take away his blades. Save for the unearthly make of his glowing eyes, slit widely and boring through them like the Gaze of Horus, Ajax looked no more remarkable than a lean man in his early fifties. Tall, peppered with whiskers over darkly tanned skin, peering beneath bushy eyebrows, dressed simply in travelling robes and a bound agal on his head. He simply shrugged his hands, tweaked up his sword point, and met six assassins whirling death in their hands. Seroth watched him quickly disarm two and cut their legs from under, turn and parrying a glancing stab off and into the face of a third. He nodded curtly at the boy. Now was their time to work. Now was the hour to earn their wages.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Monsters and assassin-hunters began to die. Orders to leave Ajax relatively undamaged soured efforts to try to disarm, and disable the fighting blur. That was what he was. A moving phantom of after-motion slicing his way through hides, limbs, torsos, anything that stood out in his path. Disarmed weaponry clattered with loud peals onto the floor. Seroth worked his sword through the gullet of one beast, cut through bone and spine and muscle, turning to loose the edge through its side and slash dually with blade and knife through the throat and chest of another assassin. He left his knife stuck in the man’s throat and plucked the short-sword out of the air. The lad turned on his waist and leg, loosing the weapon of his hand. Shooting straight, true, it dove into Harcress’ backside.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman howled and double up, picking the weapon out of his hide before breaking it across his knee. Ajax became alerted to the thunderous shadow hauling itself over him, and addressed the monster. His cuts intercepted with Hacress’ forearms, planing off hide, meat, and fur. Harcress doubled-back, stepping out of the silver-swords reach, now wary of the excruciating striations of agony savaging up into his skull. It was the silver. It’s touch burned and hewed through his flesh, ignoring hardened skin, torching fire up his blood until it stung in his throat. Ajax strode up to him. He wove a simple hexagonal pattern with his sword-point, foiling Harcress’ attempts to deflect, simply stabbing in through the Wolfman’s thigh up to the crosshilt. The slayer disengaged, whipping his sword free in a hot run of blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hnnnaaarrrggh~!!” Frustrated out of success, Harcress hunched onto his hands and sped off in a run. Despite taking wounds, his speed was yet considerable. Ajax had to watch his great form shudder and bound out of sight back down the long corridor, where half-light began to conceal him from view. Distantly, both he and the lad interpreted sounds of displaced water: the beast was swimming to freedom through the flooded sinks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth dealt with a remainder of garbed warriors while Ajax saw to the last Sithspawn. To their credit, the assassins kept up the battle, traceless of fear. Their discipline was admirable, iron-like, they yielded only to killing blows. Four worked against him, operating in fluid pairs, utilizing hypnotic flows in their bodily motion to try and trick his sight. Already he felt a slight twinge of acidic nausea play up in his belly. One feinted while his partner rolled over his back and swung to take Seroth through his throat. The lad was turning likewise, ducking under the blade-edge in the midst of his counter-pirouette and kissing his vibro-edge through the assassin’s ribs, heart, and lungs. That one fell dead, leaving the last three forming into a small, tight phalanx.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then the phalanx rushed him and exploded. The trio flew about the lad and fell on him like a cloud of razor-flies. Knives, hooks, and telescoped swords sought purchase on his flesh. One cut him through his hip, another gouged and smashed into his shoulder, a third blow leaved a wicked slice across his thighs and left knee. Blood misted in brief, puffing clouds dampening their web-harnesses, death-masks, and whatever portions of exposed skin. With his focus waning, Seroth fell to instinct and reacted in a tornado of replying blows. He blocked and took a vertical blow to his vibrosword, bucking his knuckles and hilt up into her mask, denting it before taking off her head. Seroth turned, spinning, arcing on a perfect double pirouette that lit three slashes through the second killer. He fell apart, collapsing in on his severed torso. The last Seroth punched hard in the cheek to turn them about. Before they could swing about and apply a counter, his hands viced onto their brow and jaw.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Criik![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I had thought you would wait.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked up from the lightly jiggling corpse sprawled and dying at his feet. Ajax had finished his portion; all around them, piled atop each other with missing limbs, wearing tremendous physical wounds and signs of inflicted trauma, were the corpses of Hacress’ intended trap. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I…” The lad paused, drawing breath. His lungs ached terribly. “I suppose I should have.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax chuckled, approaching over running bubbles and mops of blood under his oiled boots. “There can be no reckoning for initiative, I suppose. He ran, you pursued?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He shrugged. “Maybe… Maybe I believed I could spring the trap. Take away that Thing’s edge of surprise.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, at the cost of yourself?” Ajax shook his head. “That is a price very, very steep to pay, young Wolf. What would they say of me if I allowed a perfectly good man to die in my stead, so that I may gain a brief upper hand? Young wolf, what am I going to do with you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite himself, Seroth was smiling. “I couldn’t tell you, Ajax. I don’t know myself. It’s always a work in progress.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahh, yes, always,” The elder hunter crooned and took out a long, silk ribbon to clean off his sword.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax,” Seroth said. “You need to explain some things to me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can it wait? The beast is loose and the hunt is not yet finished.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s exactly what I mean. Ajax, there’s more to this than just chance tragedy. These aren’t creatures taking advantage of the desolation, that Thing was brought here. He and his monster-brood. All those monsters, the ones I killed at the edge of the Scale Mile, at Slahtiz Port, those monsters were inserted and commanded to cause mischief. To kill, devour, excite local attention,” Seroth paused, feeling sweat itch and sting into his opened cuts, slowly beginning to edge a small well of blood out from one boot. “There’s a plot at work here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh, aye, and I seem to be at the center of its conspiracy,” Ajax sighed. “For that I must apologize for your troubles, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, what trouble?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmn! Just so~!” The man laughed. “Yes… Some plan to draw me here and have me become entrapped. Most perturbing. All for my sake? Half a thousand dead because they needed me to come and hunt? That is… weighty. I am wondering if I should feel responsible for this inflicted misery… Or deny the guilt that beast would have gnaw at me. Perhaps for now, I shall. When this is finished, then sorrow can come.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you have enemies?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Most certainly.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Would you know them, then? Harcress? The one they called Black Vermillion?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At that mention, Ajax snapped a shrewd, fierce glance across the atrium to Seroth. “Hacress, no. But Black Vermillion is a very hated name. Why is he a subject at all?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth pointed to the deadened track cam, at the silent PA speakers mounted on the walls and strung with unshielded wire. “When I came here and the Beast launched his trap, he briefly conversed with a second collaborator. I got him to wax a little ego, and he introduced himself as Sillian Cassat. I know him too: fabled mercenary killer across Sith, Mandalorian, and Republic space, a kind of hired commando if the rumours are true. He made brags of possessing alchemic knowledge.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Which may explain the sorry state of these ones,” Ajax toed a Sithspawn’s beheaded skull. “These are hardly refined creations, young wolf. I know Vermillion to be a man obsessed with a furthering of his infamy. Notoriety, reputation, he works in clever and cruel ways to make sure he is unsurpassed in the circles he inhabits. No evil is beneath him…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A moment’s beat. Seroth sheathed his longsword and approached Ajax, now sporting a slight limp himself. “They both belong to someone else.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A third operator?” Ajax murmured aghast.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, but not a partner, I think. Their language was… guarded. That’s the one who brought the pair here, Harcress and Cassat, probably given them the resources to operate and ensure you were drawn here, to Dromund Kaas. So I think.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So you may be correct,” The slayer hummed. “Perturbing. So very perturbing. …What of you now, young wolf?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What of your purpose now? The packs the Wolf-Thing kept wintering here are done, slain. You have seen to your end of the Commander’s contract. Which, I can vouch, was discharged quite honorably. However, this work now turns personal. You are caught in a very mean story, young wolf. It is not too late to make an escape. I can manage this investigation, with effort.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shook his head. “Harcress and Cassat are still out there. This isn’t finished until there’s justice seen for all the dead, Ajax. Did you see them…? Is that anyway for folks so ordinary to die? Who is there to avenge them but us? And if you fall…? What then, Ajax?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Come then,” He said, shouldering the lad onto his arm. It would be a very long trek out of the swamp interior back east to Hythe Park and the Heartland, where Ajax assuredly kept himself someplace to stow away from observation. “We must go. There is much to discuss yet, I think, and we are far away from warmer berths. You will stay on with me, young wolf?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ayah. But for company on the long path…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax kept accommodations in a cell-room hosted on the eighth floor of Woqley Hotel, a ‘capsule joint’ hostel, halved rooms simulating ship-born conditions found aboard more utilitarian surveillance vessels and war-time dreadnoughts. Tiling threatened to peel up against their socks tracking over the minute kitchen, the bathroom porthole was cracked and patched with insulation tape, and the singular bed suffered from a prior rat nest and had been devoured clean through cotton upholstery and space-packing foam meant for physical contouring. Seroth sat up against a cold, riveted metal wall, sipping on a hot mug of nujabes caff. He’d dressed down to his pant-legs, bound with sterilized bandage over wounds taken upon his back, chest, and arms. Ajax busied at the fusion-stove, preparing a meal.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With Harcress retreated, his cohort beats and trained-killers put to the sword, they traversed upstairs out into the marshy bog to make the half-light march for home from the desiccated outpost. Briefly, on the observation deck, amidst the uncountable corpses, elder Ajax called for a pause. Seroth bowed and listened to a small, indecipherable prayer. Then, the man stretched out his hands and cast spitting ampoules of fire onto the rotting meat. Dark floats of black smoke, scenting of bedlam and release, rose from the outpost in their wake, painting grey morning snow-skies with wistful, ashen strokes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth accepted Ajax’s invitation to rest at least a day in his ‘hide-away’, recuperate, ready his body, soul, and tools for the next leg of work. They made it to the Scale Mile and up into bustling, sickly packed Heartland by the day’s end. The lad’s wounds slowed their traverse against the westland mangroves. Now, weak sunlight was falling behind the northern inland crags crowning the axial polar regions, with striking peaks flash-frozen white as Tosito frost-diamonds. Seroth looked down into the street-work below, as coming night saw hundreds of heat-lamps prick and flicker on. Folk dressed on their heatgowns a little tighter against sub-zero breezes howling up from the swamp desolation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A plate of penne and roast chicken dipped in mushroom sauces and oregano slid onto the table before him. Ajax sat opposite, taking up fork and a small tumbler topped with frothy blood-cider. “Dinner is what gives a good discussion enough incentive to be worth the time speaking,” He said taking an ample bite. “You have been sitting there in thought for a very long while, young wolf. Won’t you share with me what’s upon your mind?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad glided his fork beneath a strip of chicken, swirling it until it was fairly swimming in sauce. “Just… running through a few observations, is all.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tell me anyway.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth bit, chewed, swallowed, and washed back with a cup of amasec. “Alchemy is one of the last arts in the ‘Jedi’ repertoire that requires a usage of… mysticism… in place of what’s been established as supposed ‘Force canon.’ Lack of a better term… It’s magic. Its chaos and spiritualism all bound together in reshaping flesh. Yet, it’s costly.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Alchemy very ordinarily exacts tall prices for the effects desired. It takes an incredible degree of expertise to bypass those costs and is the mark of a master’s practiced strokes. Such that it makes their creations very singular, young wolf, not easy to duplicate.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye,” Seroth hummed, tapping his plate with the butt of his fork. “It speaks of resources. This ‘third one’ exercised a transfer of wealth to secure the services of Sillian Cassat, buying out his wares, ensuring that he’d be allowed and able to conduct his work in engineering whatever monsters bled out of his imagination. By what we’ve killed, Ajax, looking at that Wolfman, we’ve wasted an investment of… millions.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“More, I like to think, but ahhh, what is speaking now but ego?” Ajax chuckled, sipping at his glass. “Go on, what else have you ruminated? I wish to follow this thought-trail to its fulcrum and beyond!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Million spent in hiring… Creating… Transporting, loosing those things here on Dromund Kaas, and getting Cassat and Harcress situated out of sight. Out of any possible digital surveillance. More resources, more time spent casting the details down correctly. More evidence this isn’t some grim fancy from yesterday.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There can be no accounting either, young wolf, for how long a ‘Spawn may take to properly gestate to a point of stable existence. If you can bother stomaching calling it ‘stable’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A year, maybe? Perhaps more?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For this Cassat’s piddling ability, I’d say so. Alchemy isn’t kind to fumbling. Doubtless he burned through dozens of ‘volunteers’ before constructing a proper batch to foist off on Hythe Park.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To catch you,” Seroth said then, looking up sternly. “To lure you here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Yes, it seems.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not seems, Ajax, they were disappointed when I turned up in your stead. Then when you came to my rescue, Harcress was ready to collapse skulls just so he could get his paws on you, undamaged. Millions in credits spent to engineer a killing brood of ‘Spawn, transporting them to landfall, seeding them into the landscape, trying to generate enough word to reach your ears so you would come.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And they knew you’d catch whisper. They, whoever they are, also knew that you were in the Galactic neighborhood. That… That can speak for itself. Ajax, someone is going through an awful lot of work to find you...”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, and it must perturb you to realize I am so sought after,” Ajax poked his fork through several noodles and chicken, slurping them up into his teeth and cheeks. “Truly, until this eve, I imagined all my queries could be answered by a theory much more mundane. Now… Now, I fear I must admit to my faltering convictions. I have enemies. Unseen. Wishing something from me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad settled back into his contemplative quiet, slowly making the rounds on his meal that was, in time, becoming devoured. Beats of silence passed, listening to drones of passing auto-cars below whisking through streets slogged with snow and ice slurry, drumming up a constant drone of engine-roar. Finally, Seroth looked up. “What do you think they want from you, Ajax?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Gold aglow, truly wolven eyes glanced his way. “My secrets. Things I keep guarded in my soul, for that has been my charge for a very long while. Things, forgive my arrogance, which have been worth killing for, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth just stared. Ajax settled against his high, welded chair, gulping back the last mouthfuls in his tumbler and reaching to pour for more. The lad obliged him, tipping up the bottle so bloodied cider tinkled against the glass. “Thank you…I think, young wolf, I shall tell you some things. You have been diligent in this work, aiding against odds otherwise raised insurmountably against your soul. Perhaps without you, I may not have been alerted to this conspiracy until far too late. Let me tell you some things…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We are not so dissimilar, young wolf. We make our coin in the same profession: monster slaying. Whether natural creations weathered from evolution, the dangerous mutant, or indeed, vile Sithspawn. The hunt draws us; you feel the ache in your bones each instance you peer up and hear something howling down from star light. In that, young wolf, we are maybe brothers. Yet, we are not the same,” Ajax turned his sight away and drew up a draught to his lips.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yours is a vocation, mine it… It is a cause. The cause of my soul. I am Dunaan… What most call a witcher,” He said, locking himself and the lad in a riveting stare. “Suffice to say, there is a great deal of time and lost motes of history regarding my caste. We’ve no time for it tonight. You need only know that we came from the darkness north of the Galaxy, in those times when those arrogant Je’daii believed themselves an authority on matters concerning the Power and its usage. Ahhh yes… A very long time ago. We were few then, and we’re fewer now, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How did you become a witcher?” Seroth felt he had to ask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I was in a very desperate strait, my young friend,” Ajax managed to answer after considerable pause. “Then, I was found and given a choice. There was recognition of the matter constructing my soul. I was… ‘right for the job’, I suppose,” He whispered to himself. “I underwent a time of training… Then treatment. My body, it… It braved the Trial of the Waters. An alchemic process that alters one’s physicality and physiology permanently, forever. The Waters scoured me, trying to find me wanting. I came close to death but survived. Out I came, emerging a nascent Dunaan, incredibly fast, monstrously strong, more hardy and sensitive than any ordinary human. Speed, strength, reflexes, senses, heightened to post-human levels: all without dependence on the Power. That… That had always been a sort of emphasis for us. Weaning off reliance on that brand of Chaos save for when it suited us, not the other way around.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You say alchemy has a cost,” The lad spoke up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Indeed. The price paid was a renouncing ourselves from the throngs of humanity, young wolf. I am no longer human,” Up lit those slit-oval eyes so broadly gold and washing with strange, glowing energies. “My presence is reviled. Unnatural, they call me, Spawn of the Black! Yes… Yes, therein lies the irony of my life, young wolf. I amn, to the effect, Sithspawn. Re-crafted by forbidden magiks, a monster brewed to hunt and slaughter other monsters. For that is Ys’ legacy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ys…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where my caste originated, young wolf!” Ajax now exclaimed, an uncanny wistfulness prevalent on his face. “The Kingdom Beyond the North! Castles in the sky, where they fought against the Black Fire, raised themselves to be a pinnacle, before everything fell away in fire and ruin! Ys, young Seroth,” The witcher steadied himself to look upon his guest. “That is what I believe my enemies seek. Ys… And all her lost treasures and glories, which must never be brought to light. Such is why only we few of the Dunaan know the Road there. …Which now I am certain is the key in all this.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But now to the issue, friend!” The man finished a last assault upon his lathered noodles, washing down his throat with a burst of cider and looking almost satisfied that he’d had a kind of confessional. “What do we know? That this enemy is moneyed, resourceful, and unbothered with spending lives. That they are fanatical, as evidenced by those assassins. And that their reach is more wider and unseen then either of us could have dared thought.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…And that they’ve lost their surprise,” Seroth smiled slightly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perhaps, but we’re at a conundrum, young wolf. Knowing our enemies presence does not afford us much luxury. They are still hidden, whereas I believe we are exposed, in plain sight. These territories are under their sway; further ambushes could be waiting around any corner,” Ajax sighed, putting aside his glass. Outside, an ambulance car rolled past, blaring its siren at maximum audio-gain. “There are ways we could afford an escape; draw them out somewhere and initiate a small war away from Hythe Park. Ahhh, but what if they refuse to budge?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They have no reason to take up a chase when they know we’ll have to return if they decide they want to kill every man, woman, and child in Hythe Park,” The lad murmured darkly. “But they’re work depends on a reactive enemy. …What if we went on the initiative?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Went on the hunt, you mean,” Something quite hungry and perhaps fearsome took up station in the light of Ajax’s eyes. “That if we took up sword and fire and went scouring every hiding place we could detect, trail them until they feel as harrowed as the Nine Hells?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Counter action was a deathly gamble. Seroth observed Ajax rise and fetch their plates, sinking them into a worn plasteel wash-basin scoured with scarred tracts of scratching. The faucet ran, dousing in hot water, foaming in a chemical wash bubbling until it threatened to seep over the tub-lip. The witcher turned away to allow a brief soak, pacing in the short cell-space. The lad wondered if he was considering each pitfall as he was. This unseen operator was clever enough to set a trap perhaps an entire year in advance for Ajax, perhaps simultaneously maneuvering players and scenarios to anticipate a dozen possible counters if it failed. For every step he took, Seroth couldn’t help feeling he lagged behind by another ten. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Time,” Ajax said. “Is a very rare luxury for any hunter to enjoy. If you stop to take pause, then your query turns elusive, the trail colds, and you lose your way. But we are prey now as much as slayers, young wolf. Pursued, the captors must come to us. I say we wait for a time. Give it a week, my friend. And if nothing occurs in those days, we visit the trail and see where we are lead? This is agreeable, yah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” Seroth nodded, attempting to stand. Ajax crossed the kitchen and patted him back into the seat, now bearing down him with a stern set to his gaze.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, and we are going where?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m not taking the only bed here, Ajax, I have my own place to sleep,” Said Seroth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, but for the sake of my aging nerves, you can remain here for a time to allow my bandages to do their work, yes? Wolves share the den, my friend, jah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…For the sake of your nerves, Ajax,” The lad nodded in final acquiescence, scratching at the stitching helping repair the claw-tears across his shoulder blades. “…And where are you off to?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He saw that the witcher was busily tugging up his knee-boots, checking over the edging of his great, silver sword for any undo nicks telling a need for a whetstone’s kiss, fixing on his harness webgear and fitting the agal over his brow. Ajax was returning to the field. “Waiting does not equate to sheer idleness. There are some things I believe I shall attend to. Besides, in case you are feeling slighted, I am not the one so cut and bruised. Were I? Then jah, you could prop up on a chair and guard my sleep.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth screwed his face into something between consternation and wry humour at the man’s peculiar nature. “Are all Dunaan like you, friend?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh no,” He said, walking for the door. “Not at all.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The bed was a seven foot long slab set atop what looked like a sunken tub of polished derrocrete and brass, with paneling on the wall dedicated to comfort controls: heat, lumbar, soft or hard give to the memory foam, recliner, even an option to dictate music out of a pair of discrete flexi-speakers tucked behind the pillow. Seroth drifted in and out of consciousness over the span of the following week. Occasionally, waking, he’d find Ajax half dressed and pouring over a teetering selection of dataslates, caff-pots, smoking from a long, curled branch of bone carved into a pipe. Otherwise, the witcher was gone, and he was left to imaginative devices.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Evening’s he rose to adjust the riding bandage slowly crawling up his ribs. A chair sat by the second porthole window in the confined kitchen. For an hour, more or less, he laid back and looked down into the dark bustles of bobbing lanterns whisking quickly beneath street-lamp cones. Foot traffic met with autocars to clog the long avenue in a teem of sweltering car-cabins, bodies wriggling through between fenders, as rain from melting hab-spire roofs spilled onto plastic parasols and opaque umbrellas. A steady rise of sewer fog rose up the length of the avenue, misting the Heartland in a thin gauze of half-white cloud banks, distending light and altering sound into odd echoes trembling up the building faces. Out there was Ajax, somewhere. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]To his word, Seroth staved off from affecting any courses until a weeks time concluded. Waiting was almost injurious. Time and time over again, he awoke a quarter-hour past local midnight, staring through condensed dark, stuck in thought. Harcress. Cassat. The third, unknown face, the Controller. Ajax. Ys. Harcress was perhaps the deformed handiwork of Cassat, Black Vermillion, himself, though he believed the Wolfman’s capacity for unrestrained, gleeful murder was already apparent prior to alchemic transformation. Cassat himself obviously believed there were profits to be had from this venture; his reputation was mercenary and mercurial, fickle, yo-yoing from loyal subordinate to out-of-control insurrectionist. Money, and the promise of more, were probably keeping him leashed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But the Controller, the lad thought. The third facet of the conspiracy’s trinity. What was their true angle for Dromund Kaas, Ajax, and the mysterious Road he and his elusive kin kept guarded in their memory? Ys… What was Ys to them? Certainly he’d heard of the so-called ‘Castle in the Sky’ but from a handful of faded nursery tales. Scholars concluded it was an ancient morality fable, what occurred when mortals reached to touch the faces of Gods, only to be cast down in rains of fire and ruin. Ys was myth. Wasn’t it? Yet, if it were mythical, then surely these Dunaan, witchers, were likewise figments. Ajax, however, put paid to that argument. Seroth had seen him fight. Dunaan were a solid, if exceedingly rare, reality.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]On the seventh evening, a week proper since battling Harcress across the Scale Mile river and into the corpse-haunted depths of his outpost den. Seroth took time gingerly unbinding his wounds, checking their seal of fresh, pink skin gently bunched like coral. Scar tissue. Rosa would be asking after those when they next had time to share dinner, a bath, and bed. The lad had a thought. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The rucksack emptied onto the dinner table. Hands swabbed over bits of field-kit, rolled up bandages, flint and tinder packs, high protein jerky strips, palm flashlights, a toxicity reader, a spare wood-hatchet, until the lad found a holoquill in its charging-well alongside packed stationary paper. Seroth pulled up a chair, laid the paper flatly and took up the holoquill. Many opted for simple holonet transmissions to both send and receive text scrawls and letters, but the lad never trusted ghost signals. There was too much happenstance that could allow some other party, Jedi witch hunter for instance, to track onto their whereabouts and raid the Levantine worlds for ‘deserters and heretics.’ Seroth flexed the muscle in his wrist and began to scrawl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Rosa Mazhar[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Care of 22Δ-XΞ By Knight’s Fall[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Kyrikal 3 / 6889-Frostsone Plaza[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]CPB-8808[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]To my Ashla,[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rosa~ Its between wet and freezing. Luckily, I’m in decent shelter with bedding, kitchen, and food. No camping for this outing, at least not yet. This hunt is growing more and more difficult to anticipate. There’s a thousand details to share and I hope you’ll be biding someplace warm and in comfort. Maybe it will not take this manuscript to reach free space as long as it did on that prior note. Our method of communication is… imperfect. However, few folk these days send messaging by way of old fashioned ink and parchment. It’s far more secure than digital packets. Anyone eavesdropping on the holonet will need to either intercept the package themselves, or have agents in waiting. So far, the Republic nor anyone else has caught on to our network. Let’s hope it stays so.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]I’m upon Dromund Kaas. The Mandalorians were ruthless, merciless, in leveling this place. There’s not a single city standing. Kaas City is desolate. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Miles on miles of urban centers reduced to rubble and ash. Did they tell you they dropped whole asteroids onto the surface? I flew past one… This great monstrosity digging up from the ocean floor and crust. I cannot imagine the sheer terror and agony gripping this place when it was torn to pieces. I did some digging before hand. Captain Larraq. That’s the one responsible. I’ve heard brag that he broke this world but that doesn’t cover it. It wasn’t pacification or subjugation, Rosa. It was murder. Simple murder. Overkill. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The asteroid fall and orbital bombardment’s altered the planet’s weather patterns. This world used to be more or less swampland. There were thousands on thousands of miles and acres of marshland. Right now, daily temperatures are steadily declining. It’s snowing, Rosa, and hard. Everything’s getting buried under white. A new ice age, so I’m told. Dromund Kaas will survive, I have no doubt. The world will endure. It’s people, however… For them, all I can anticipate is dread, misery, cold, and a long, long dark. Winter is coming and it does not intend to be kind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It appears there’s scattered refugee groups. I found one holed up in Slahtiz Port… It’s more a mausoleum than anything resembling a station hub. Dead were frozen to the floor. Like a palace of ice. A nightmare out of Hoth, if you can believe it. I had to lend the squatters there some aid when I found out they were under brutal attack by Sithspawn. Aye, ‘spawn are alive and well on Dromund Kaas, but I’ll get into that later. I fought them… It was hard won, but I slew any I could find before I found the majority of the pack. I was beaten to the punch, Ashla. There’s another slayer here. A man named Ajax. His accents hard to play but he has fine manners and an old fashioned way of addressing conversation. I… trust him. I’ve not seen anyone fight like him, Rosa. No Jedi, no Sith, no one. …He counts me as a friend. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Young wolf’, he calls me. Maybe he sees something akin. I don’t know. But it feels something like old Shev Rayner.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then, I met with a woman. You might like her. Commander Boudica, last standing authoritarian on Dromund Kaas. Neither she or her soldiers fled when the Empire imploded. I have to admit I mistook her, initially. I thought her just a soldier. She is Sith, which makes her attention and drive to duty all the more commendable. Her soldiers are loyal. Very rare. I think Dromund Kaas will remember her sacrifices long after Ashin is lamented. I wonder where that one is too. Where’s the Empress Ascendant while her former subjects suffer? Where are the Lords of the Fringe in supply aid? The Republic, even! …Why is Dromund Kaas being left to die? There are people here, my Ashla. In a slum, a ghetto city: Hythe Park. Some six hundred thousand folk, all bunched in. Frozen over marshlands hem them at the west, industrial desolation all about elsewhere. Somehow Hythe Park has been spared. I don’t if that’s a kindness or an act of cruelty. What I can tell, is that these people are reliant on Commander Boudica to set the standard for the next few decades, as she is reliant upon them to support her and her guard. Eventually, she’s going to require volunteers from their masses. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now is the meat of the hunt, Rosa. I came to Hythe Park, followed the clues, the scents, and went out to a place called ‘Scale Mile’. Further monsters, as you can imagine. I slew them. Barely. These aren’t like the usual beasts I’m hired out for, Ashla, these things are fiends. Daemonic, in every sense. Big, warped, too strong, too fast. Ajax makes cleaning them up look like a simple task, but I don’t possess a tenth of his natural speed, strength, nor technique. When they were dealt with, their pack Alpha emerged. A Shistavanen… Humongous Wolfman, Rosa. Another alchemic monster. I… am not sure I can beat him. Not on my own. He led me on a merry chase off into the marshlands. Another boggy shidhole, but with ice slicks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was an outpost out there. Old. Fairly abandoned, I think. Long before Larraq came and tried to glass this world. That’s where he was roosting, Rosa. And where he kept his dead: five hundred corpses belonging to the missing from Hythe Park. There’s a difference between a field of the dead when in the aftermath of war, but that was an abattoir. A butchers glen. I chased the beast down into the prison basement, where he sprung a trap. He can speak, did I mention? The Wolfman is intelligent… In a sort of monstrous sense. He can talk, hold conversation, even spout philosophy. Tried to get me off my feet. I wasn’t having it. You can’t justify that kind of murder. It wasn’t tragedy, Ashla, though there was certainly a sense of bedlam. No… He killed, did it with glee, and will probably continue to do so unless I find him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ambush was spoiled. I wasn’t the one they sought, though I’d certainly made a fierce argument. And I’d have died if Ajax hadn’t come to offer back up. As it turned? He was their man. We fought through monsters and assassin blades before Ajax put Harcress down to wounds. The Wolfman fled. Then we did in turn, after we put the dead to fire and managed our way back through hours of marsh-bush. It’d have gone swiftly, had I not been stricken with wounds myself. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]We’ve had further chance to speak, Ajax and I. He’s the fulcrum of this, Rosa. The monsters, the murders, they were engineered with specific intent to draw the man here. It’s having to do with a place called Ys, so he told me. Ys and his place in a caste called Dunaan. Witchers. Monsters who hunt other monsters, that’s how he put it. I’m inclined to accept his take on the matter. He’s certainly no longer human, not if he operates the way he does without reliance on Force augmentation or cyborg enhancement. For that… I’ll admit I admire him. Perhaps envy. It’s strange. As it stands, “Ys” is an ancient repository of mysticism and secrets from before the dawn of the Jedi. What our enemies want with it, I don’t know, but if it’s worth enough to kill half a thousand people and threaten even more, its secrets must be enormous.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]I’ve decided to hang on here. These foes, whoever they are, cannot have Ajax. And they cannot have his secrets. Rosa, I don’t know what it is, but there is something peering back through the dark nights at me. When the snow’s falling thickest, I look and I swear there’s a pall over this place. Hythe Park’s in danger. Ajax is in danger, and so am I. There’s malevolence and greed at play here, and it’s not going to stop until it attains exactly what it wants. It wants Ajax… It wants everything he has to do with Ys, wherever it could be. …It’s willing to spend innocent lives in that pursuit. Dark hunger. Something is coming. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]I’ll leave this in care of our usual contacts. Hopefully they can get this to you before too much time’s passed and you start worrying. But I suspect you worry regardless. Sleep well, Ashla. I’ll be with you under warmer suns soon. I love you~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~Seroth[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The holoquill edged back into the waiting charge-well, with sparks of electricity chasing up over the hard brass nub as the pen hungrily drank from the power dispenser. Seroth took up the letter, blowing to cool the heated lettering partially ‘burned’ against the paper and achieving an up-raised effect, the letters embossed in his short-hand writing. He gripped the page corners, folded, and folded again, stashing it into a length of brown leather envelope tied over with catgut. Seroth’s touch would transfer both fingerprints and a subtle pheromone signature; something someone with a properly calibrated sensor-wand would be able to discern. Simple, but hopefully effective.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was leaning to stand up from the table and adjoining window when he felt a curious tremor travel up through his feet. Naked toes and foot soles pressed onto cool linoleum tiles, when a hard, ringing jolt shuddered up his heel, calve, thigh, all the way up into the coils of his ribs. He couldn’t reckon the sensation when, not even a handful of seconds later, another tremor met against his feet and shivered up through the bone and meat of his skull. Seroth turned and peered through the porthole aperture, staring into the long dark beyond Hythe Park. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…The dark had grown considerably closer than when he last glanced out into the night. Realization hit: entire hab-blocks were losing power. Section by section, the ghetto-slum was being rocked by further heaves that sundered electricity from the district squares. The coming black out paced with insidious motion up further and further across the poor city, as entire stretches of buildings, shops, clubs, holo-signs, street lamps, anything powered by the underlying power grids, fell dead. In a moment Seroth listened to a sub-sound of failing power lines go silent, the capsule room lights flickering testily before dimming out. One glow-bulb simply burst with a shock of cascading glass and sparks. White tiling and teal walls shaded to pitch jet and cyan. Grey illumination cast through the window.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked out again. Sounds were now reaching him. Somebody railed on their car-horn before executing an ugly peal of durasteel clashing on duranium and plastic siding. Ugly crunches of metal meeting metal in head-on collisions rose above the screaming din. Foot traffic was in a panic. Inky shapes below across the sidewalks hurtled about like pools of confused ants. Somewhere, someone lit off a spat of blaster fire. Streaks of hot red-on-white bolts skittered into the side of hab-spire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad was quick to get dressed. On suited his tunic, pants, harness belts, boots, grabbing for his idling weaponry stowed away on the kitchen counter. The weight of axe, knife, and sword was something of a comfort now. Seroth stretched, testing the tense in his shoulders and weather or not his resting had improved his sore and worn out condition a week prior. If the jarring echo that was his instinct was any indication, the complete black out was the start of a long, awful night. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Distantly, there came a third, heavier rumble. A glancing shockwave lifted dust and scattered ice-water off scores of rooftops. Beyond rose thickening fire-balls wreathed black with tendrils of smoke, hinting at extensive pyrotechnics. Seroth turned against the window and gleaned a distant, ferrocrete plant complex lit bright by fire loosing in torrents from its roofing. Briefly he swore he could see shapes cavorting against the sheet-walls of flame, like macabre puppets engaged in mad dances to appease unseen, laughing daemons.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned away, checking the catches of his harness and sword, forcing open the capsule-room auto-door. Behind him rested the small leather envelope detailing Rosa’s waiting letter, now lonely atop the kitchen oval-table…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]A minute to midnight, IED’s concentrated around Hythe Park’s singular power-plant, the O’Signlex-Macrov building, detonated. Prior to that, shadows in the shapes of ghouls stole in and slaughtered any standing employees manning the station through the night hours. As folks crowded the long gates separating the plant grounds from surrounding hab-block lots, they saw motley things attached upon the steel-barred fences, watching fire light illuminate strung up corpses tied up high by lengths of electrical and binding iron wire. Most were missing their heads, neck stumps showing off signs of blunt savagery that suggested they’d simply been torn off. At their feet were still warm lumps of disemboweled organ-meat; intestine, colon, stomach, liver, heart, even entire rib-cages. The crowd swarmed away. Atop the plant roofing, things with hideous shape danced and cavorted in the light and heat, whooping and howling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A rickshaw driver rode Seroth up to the tail-end of the staring, chattering crowd. Winds from the south fed into the holocaust flares of fire shooting up like walls from the slanted plant roofing. Snow drifts piled on the street-sides, ice caked over the paved cobblestones under boot, were melting. Warm sloshes of run-off splashed against the lad’s boots, strolling up to look over a hundred leering shoulders. People in their heatgowns adjusted up their opaque parasols, wiping dew and sweat off their throats, blinking against ash that fell on their eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth arrived as Hythe Park’s own volunteer fire brigade fell in on bulked hovercraft laced with bulbous container-nacelles. Their craft was aged, flecked with peeling, red paint on the riveted hulling, trying to extend long delivery ladders that were upsetting their precarious repulsor balance. Hooked hose-lines shivered, and then spat clouds of foam chemical retardant upon the worst points of venting fire. The lad listened to the crowd cheering, fixing up his hood. His fingers were about to unhook his comm. piece when he noticed something amiss. One great, tall shape disentangled itself from the pitch smoke and was blitzing a searing run across the super-heated roof tiles. Digitigrade paws dug in, smashed tin and aluminum under-claw, leaping with uncanny height. Seroth watched it jump and attach itself to one hose ladder, sheer weight giving the repuslor engines grief. It hauled itself along, rung by run ‘till it reached the driver’s cabin. Claws rent through the steel framed windshields, clutching at the driver and attendant. From the distance, detail was murky, rarified by bars of smoke. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When the air cleared, the cabin looked violently decompressed, awash with blood and spinning in an uncontrolled tumble. The beast stuck at its crumpled nose heaved, bucking on its spin, virtually wrenching it out of the air. The crowd stilled; no one uttered a whimper, observing the fire brigade hose-truck collide into the power plant’s north tower. Seroth couldn’t see if the beast made an escape. The hose-truck whipped in on its starboard plane, tearing through stone-work, steel girding, rebar, showering the fire with interior materials of insulation, cratered glow-lamps, dented snakes of torn out guard railings, pocked stairway. One overworked anti-grav plat hurtled the tail-end of the truck around like a bat. The hose-truck battered against the tower a second time, no less slowed. This time, however, it dug in too deeply. There was a warble of stone grinding on rock, a real deep sonic bawl, mixed with screams of twisting support beams squealing under duress. After one moment of eternal precariousness, the tower collapsed over and fell in on the main plant hall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The crowd broke finally, screaming, as blue-white casts of bursting electric lines ghosted traces of strange light amidst the ruin. Seroth stepped in against the milling bodies running back down the long alleyway. Slush and ice-water splashed and coated over his boots and pants, none paying the stranger swordsman heed, scrambling to get clear of the destructive spectacle. The lad pushed against the tumult. His hand clenched the comm. piece, raising a furtive signal over Hythe Park.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Young wolf!” A tiny voice exclaimed. “There is Hellfire! There is not a spot in this wretched place you can’t see it from! The enemy’s awoken and I fear we are found wanting! Where are you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Literally at the gates,” Seroth said, striding up to the ash-glazed entry checkpoint, looking into the officer’s booth to see a mosaic of strewn guts and arterial blood spatter rinsed on the white-yellow wall. Someone was slumped over a long computer bank; they appeared to be missing the majority of their spine and occipital bone. “The heat is blazing. Fire trucks tried to douse the flames but… something, maybe Harcress himself, caught one and broke it into a cooling tower. …Then said tower fell in on the plant itself. It’s a mess, Ajax. Where the hell are you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Returned to our capsule-room, young wolf. Was, I should clarify. Did you leave a letter? Later! What are you doing now?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad glanced east along the rapidly emptied length of roadway running adjacent to the plant on a bordering square. Broken down auto-cars, speeders, missing paint, windows, engine components, some reduced to sheer framework skeletons, lay slumbering under melting snow. Sewer grates were struggling to keep up the intake of rushing water pouring in to at their low-point, choked with plastic refuse and throwaway. The fire from the plant set everything in a cast of surreal glows and long, dagger shadows shivering like a too-fast tide.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Looking for a way in.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“In? Any upper floors are going to be flooded with flame. Too hot, your bones will be cooked of flesh, my friend.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Which means likewise for those animals. They’ve probably fled into the sub-basements to escape the heat, and probably have some escape vector set up. Ajax, if we act, we can keep this pack contained on the plant grounds. If they’re busy trying to kill us, they won’t be out killing citizens in the dark.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just so, young wolf. If you cannot descend through the rubble, then mayhap we can ascend. Look for any manhole covers. See if you can’t make your way through the sewers, the water filtration tunnels that surely must wind beneath the plant grounds. But beware,” Ajax said, as his signal began to grow vacant with white noise. “It’s doubtless a maze below. I’ll be with you shortly. Perhaps… A pincer?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their transmission cut in an abrupt screech of frightening static. Seroth keyed the comm. piece off and re-affixed it back onto his harness belt, taking a few moments to adjust a small breath-scarf up across his lips and nostrils. Sewer work, traversing the half-light and stink of waste grime and slippery, networking tunnel-streets was always messy, stomach turning. Walking along up the roadway, past the rust-devour speeders slunk against the sidewalk and abandoned, he looked for tell-tale gusts of steam leaking up from the stone-work. There. Long hisses of white, smoky clouds. Seroth unhooked his tomahawk from his belt and strode over to the manhole. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With an effort, he sunk an axe-spike through a small hole roughly as wide as his thumb, usually designed for street workers to hook in their poles and drag the cover off the entry whole. Seroth grunted, peeling the manhole aside. Already fragrant aromas describing a mixture of vegetable rot, excrement, and sour milk shot up. The lad felt his eyes watering from the stench. He clipped his headband and lamp over his brow and temples, flicking on the illumination cone. Then, tomahawk in hand, he scaled down the slippery ladder rungs into the reeking dark.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Emergency back-ups kept a few straggling, spare lights along the tunnel-passages illuminated. Otherwise, the death of the power plant stole all other light save for anything battery operated. Already, stepping across a long tunnel sloughed with a deep canal stoked high with sewer water, the shortened, curled ceiling vaults helped lend an oppressive air. Seroth didn’t envy anyone hired out to work the sewer courses below Hythe Park. It was a remnant of older architectural style prior to what some called ‘Novus Republica’; a smoothed, tall approach with large negative spaces to emphasize majesty and grandeur. This was brutalism. Curt, boxy, gothic. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth followed along the canal tunnel, passing several intersecting + junctions that lead off to nowhere. Ajax hadn’t been idly joking mentioning the crisscrossing passage-work was mazelike, confusing. Once in a while, shapes in the running water swam by the lad. He looked, finding rheumy eyes staring up from the brown bracken, submerging a moment later and swimming out of sight. Trash beasts, he guessed. Idle, sewer mutants that subsisted on trash and detritus still edible with nutrition. Seroth didn’t prefer giving them hunt, as often they preferred being left alone to scouring the canals and settling pools for throwaways left behind by society above. Every once in a time, one of them would grow too large, too hungry. Such was when sewer workers began to go missing, and when he began lacing up rubber boots and a rebreather masks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He turned right at another point intersecting a tunnel across his way. The headlamp bounced light off slick patches of constantly wet stone-work. Stiff mortar was hitched with overhangs of emerald and viridian hangs of sludgy moss. Lichen grew like coral along some stretches of exposed wall, porous stone, wafting spores from inhabiting algae. Seroth noted the stench never let up and in fact seemed to only grow increasingly powerful the further he trod in amidst the long dark. His right hand kept a hold on his long tomahawk, the left gripping the sheathe knife. The lengths of grille pathway were too narrow for his customary sword-play. Combat, if he saw any now, would come to raw close quarters. Thinking of what beasts waited beyond in their hidden, underground fastness, Seroth didn’t feel like relishing the prospect.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Navigation came following the warmth and the long sub-sonic groan of heat-flash roaring from the plant fire. Seroth waited, felt for a gust of too-hot air against his cheek, then took another right up third canal passage. Hints of roiling, acrid smoke stole over the general stench of filth. With warmer breezes beginning to give his eyes a reason to water, Seroth wagered he was settled somewhere beneath the plant grounds. Ahead, the tunnel dropped away into a wide basin pit beside a dozen other similar spout openings, disgorging tons on tons of dirty water into a swirling collection tank hurtling like a whirlpool below. The way on was by a length of catwalk stretching across the pit, suspended by still chains.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stepped back by a rough ten meters, checking that his boots held traction, then ran. He blazed a hurdle for the opening spout of the canal drop and leapt into empty air. There was a rush of sour wind on his face, ears aloud with a roar of blood and air, hands outstretched. The angle of his leap would take him off a solid landing on the grille walkway some eighteen meters below. But his gloves caught and gripped around a ribbon of oily chain and held him fast, swinging him around as he coiled onto the steel links. The lad descended, until his heels stamped on the guard-rail and he could safely swing down onto the catwalk decking, peering up into the shadowed recesses high overhead. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The collection pit was far more starkly massive than he’d given it credit. Even the high beam of his piercing head-lamp failed to thread through the gloom far up overhead. The canal tunnels he’d been faithfully crossing and maneuvering by had all been jutting at a constant downward egress. Just how far down he had ventured was difficult to accurately measure. Only that even here, spiteful heat was beginning to warm through the pit roofing. There was distant bit of dim glow up above, staring like a sickly, ailing sun. Raging fires were beginning to chew and melt their way through layers of stone and metal, fueled by grease-traps and gas-lines. Somewhere, something exploded. Seroth could feel its reverberation rack all way down to the catwalk and below.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The grille-bridge extended into its own labyrinth of inter-connecting maintenance hallways wrought against set slabs of tremendous concrete and ferro-rock. There were no sewage rivers but the smell persisted. Seroth tucked his scarf off his mouth to breathe in the too-warm air. Scents of burning insulate foam and rubber wire sheathing coasted down the tunnel-system as he turned through a low hatch and stepped inside an overseer’s station. The headlamp drew a line over the mess-ponchos hooked up on the walls, lengths of plastic board detailing shifts, switches of personnel, any outstanding mechanical deficiencies requiring repair. Room temperature gave the still bodies laying over the row of desks on the far chamber side the illusion of body warmth. Seroth panned his light, noting their savaged midriffs and gnawed off faces. Sithspawn had come this way.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Trace splashes and paw-prints flecked in gore lead the way on. Seroth felt his gullet beginning to tighten, steeling against a rise of tension playing up his backbone. The tracks zigged and shunted around sharp corner turns in the lamp-light blackness. They at times traced over themselves, doubling back, showcasing all the signs of an animal intelligence as the monsters had wandered about in randomized patterns, looking for more hapless workers that were being unknowingly tracked. Seroth theorized a portion of the pack-strength had come in through the sewers as he had, into the plant sublevels through these unguarded sectors. Others simply attacked through the plant upper floors and streets.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually, all tracks, hints of scat, and half chewed thigh and calve bones took the lad into a starkly lit cavern. It was a wide cross-chamber, stitched with platforms, catwalks, railed collection pools that currently laid perfectly still, placid. Dozens of flood-lights had been erected to pylons upholding the bare ceiling. Fusion generators hummed throatily. As many PA speakers had been wired against the stone, stuck up with spirit-gum or otherwise quickly bolted to the ferrocrete or welded to metal girders using heat-lamps. Seroth stowed his axe and knife away, drawing out the vibrosword clenched over his back.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aww. …Awww, hello!” Said a broadcasted voice. Seroth stilled, waiting. This was it. The chamber had been rigged and wired to provide some illumination, waiting for someone to inevitably come through. He’d walked into a new killing trap.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I thought my model expected too much but yet, here you are,” Said the spidery tones belonging to Sillian V. Cassat. “For once, reality matched my anticipation. Hello, boy. Are you well? You looked a little soaked. I think those old rags of yours deserve a crematory service, the stench will never come out otherwise. It does reek a little, doesn’t it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Black Vermillion,” Seroth murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So you remembered!,” Cassat laughed. “I love first impressions. I work so hard to see that, even if we shouldn’t meet for another sixty years or so, you’d still remember me. That… That is quite a power right there, boy, memory. We forget so much on a day by day basis.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad scanned the room, checking at the ceiling, the walkways spanning over the chamber pools and rockcrete platforms. Despite the naked beam from his headlamp, he couldn’t discern any other presences. Either he was still alone, or the monsters were patient and invisible. Seroth adjusted his gripping along his longsword.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I have to say, I couldn’t forget you either, boy,” Cassat went on. “I mean, two years of preparatory ground work. Getting money, using the money, birthing all these exquisite things after veritable hordes of failures. Setting this husk of a world up as prime ground for a little play, catching all those bloody stupid peasants, idling the time with a bit of perfunctory surgery… Listening to that voice asking for updates. Rather constantly. …Then you show up and shid on everything!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My apologies,” Seroth smiled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh save the sarcasm. A surprise is a surprise is a surprise. We know our man is here anyway. Just a simple matter of time before he, like you, slips up royally and plays into our grasp. A matter of time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t think so.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Boy, what you do and do not think are categorically irrelevant now. Your idea to come this deep and draw us down for battle was admirable and you get praise for attempting its execution. But you have to know we were one step ahead of you. It’s the heroics, you see. ‘Save the people.’ So blithely predictable.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad’s ears twitched. There was a piqued sound of bubbles rippling up to a nearby pool surface, bursting over the waters.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now,” The speaker paused to scratch at something roughly textured nearby the mic. “You’re probably thinking this is just the swamp playing out twice. We set the trap, said trap is sprung, oh shid, it’s the wrong man. …But it’s not the wrong man,” Cassat purred. “Not this time. You’re exactly the son of a queen we were waiting for.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth watched the chamber pool ahead on his right swirl with foamy breakers lapping at the smooth containment walls, observing some massive, furred shape swim up to breach. One enlarged, wolven snout broke for air, gulping thirstily for breath, heaving itself up out of the pool with trunk-like arms. Harcress, as large as four brawlers apiece, sleek with a long, wet coat of coarse hairs, swung his bulk up onto the walkway and bent the grille-plates in beneath his hind-paws. The Wolfman snorted water from his nostrils, whilst simultaneously winding up his arms. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You can’t understand how intriguing it was when a friend of ours shared a few details about you… Mister Gunn.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad was watched through a camera feed plugged beneath a PA speaker grille, as his posture glaringly froze. “Ahhh, aye… From those details was constructed an overview of what use you might play if we attempted a capture of your person, rather than infuriatingly lucky witcher. After all, you seem a sight easier. To be fair, you’ve cost me quite a number of pets that I slaved over with excruciating care. That… That I’ve decided is going to cost you. You’ve pissed in my beer, Mister Gunn. Harcress!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Shistavanen hauled up his paw and twitched an ear. “Break him and make him feel it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hhhggnnn… Well come on, boy,” The Wolfman growled. He began sauntering forward on legs taking him closer to the lad by two meters a step. “No hero to save you now.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t run away, then,” Seroth snarled, lighting his vibrosword and joining Harcress in a opposing charge.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress came at Seroth. He was forty two stones of symmetrical killing muscle and bone. The grille plates on their catwalk bent and snapped out beneath his hindpaws in his charge. Seroth could smell the chemical stink on his fur, raw gusts of sewage laced breath, see murderous light aglow behind his too –large, black eyes. If the Shistavanen wasn’t careful, he’d perhaps slay the boy rather than disarm and potentially dismember him. Something told the boy Harcress wasn’t playing at making much distinction. He swung back one tremendous, trunk arm and slashed. Seroth back-stepped broadly, listening to the razor keen as six-inch claws sang in the muggy, reeking air. Harcress’ miss took his swing through a pair of supporting chain-ropes. Iron-links snapped, Seroth angling his blade up to deflect. Three hurtling pieces rang off his blade; the third he twitched his blade-flat slightly, ricocheting it back into Harcress’ maw. The link bounced off the bulb of his nose, splitting the tender skin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman roared and spat a length of reddened spittle from his, came on, and swatted his forearm into the lad. Seroth went sailing. Vision spinning in intensifying rotations, the ceiling and oncoming platform were difficult to distinguish. Instinct called for him to affect a landing. The lad braced and plied down his boots, their soles catching on the dusty, smooth stone, scratching his gloved fingers against the patchy grain. He’d just come to his footing when Harcress made a leap, destroying the catwalk out from beneath his jumping bulk, landing opposite Seroth atop the cross-chambers central pillar-top.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad backed up, fixed his gripping on his longsword, then re-engaged. Open, furry palms met with his strokes, slapping them aside in singes of toasted hair and skin. There was barely twelve meters of foot-space atop the platform as their footfalls kicked and gusted up small banks of prone dust frosted across the granite. Harcress was laughing. He came in, a straight jab. Seroth was swift but he lacked similarly monstrous speed, agility. His backward pacing mitigated the crunching knuckle blow, though it cracked against his sternum, briefly driving him free of breath. The lad fell back, skidding on his shoulders. The Wolfman was still chuckling. Through the coursing agony bunching in the muscle attached to his ribbing, he looked and saw a footpaw stop a hands-length away from his skull. It was like a fire-log, bulky, patched with flecked, too-dried skin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Perhaps too close for Harcress’ comfort. Seroth whipped his sheathe-blade free and struck, stoving it through until the point scratched rock and the hilt crunched against bone. The Wolfman howled, and swore at the lad with a dozen course oaths he’d never quite heard before in combination. He wrenched the blade free, washing his arm and sleeve in a gout of blood, rolling up onto his feet and pressing back against the Wolfman. Harcress was limping, pre-occupied by the sudden wound taken on his left sole. He rose up his forearms to take the brunt. Seroth ran and turned a keen pirouette, hacking vertically in three blows, planing off hair and slivers of flesh before stepping away and harrying his blade between himself and the Beast.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cagey, the ‘spawn Shistavanen peered down at the boy over the ragged barrel of his thickened, bristling snout. His jaw worked, gnashing scores of bright, yellow fangs together. Many hung and protruded up against thin, blubbery black lips. Harcress tried wiping off the blood greasing his fur whilst wrenching neck about, cracking a deep, wet –pop!-. Seroth observed him ignore the limp in his left foot. Harcress padded in, swiping left-right-left in a constant savage of gleaming hand-claws, trying to wrench away the lad’s sword while simultaneously forcing him on a constant back peddle, stuck defending the rain of blows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every crash across the blade-flat tremored awful shakes up through the lad’s wrist-bones and shoulders. He ran through dedicated catch-guards, deflecting strike upon slice, ozone lifting each time the Wolfman’s reinforced talon-claws met with the burning edging of his vibrosword. Behind him loomed a ten meter drop into pooled waste-water lapping softly at the platforms sunken stanchions. Harcress whipped his claws around before spinning, trying to whack a back-hand knuckle-blow through the bone and grey matter of Seroth’s temple. Stuck, with half his footing teetering over the platform edging, the lad bent his knees in and leaned back as far as his backbone felt comfortable allowing. Harcress’ blow sailed bare inches above his eyes, his nose. With little recourse, Seroth then jumped and tucked up into a tightened, limbed ball, smashing out with his toes. They connected into the Wolfman’s immovable tricep, leaving the lad to propel himself back in a keen flip through empty air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned, arms outstretched for aerial balance, managing to pin a hard landing onto a second adjacent catwalk five meters from the platform. Above, Harcress was already addressing for a chasing leap. The lad looked to his rapidly falling bulk, to the thin grilling and steel-alloy guard-rails, flicking between a dozen options to give the Wolfman as much delaying trouble as he could afford. The longsword flashed. Vibro-edged durasteel burned and melted through portions of the catwalk length, cool air causing a quick melt to the half-soldered cuts though touching down on the savaged metal planks and hand-holds would be tremulous. Harcress either didn’t note the lad blurring back along the walk-way, hacking as he went, or simply didn’t care. The boy couldn’t keep wringing out of his reach: sooner or later, he’d run out of room. Not yet. Seroth grinned nastily as the Wolfman’s over-weight crunched into the grille where he’d patterned striating blows through, and suddenly blew clean through the plating, showering displaced sparks as metal dragged on metal, sinking into the long, deep pools below.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Shistavanen sank out of sight. The waters were little better than murky bracken. Pitted islands of motley tinfoil, plastics, hardened foods floating like sponge and pumice, wreathes of discarded packaging, and afloat bottle-caps bobbed against the thickened support beams rising up into the shadowed ceiling girders. Quiet descended upon the chamber. The lad became keenly aware of the sour rise of his own sweat, licking down into his eyes as he rubbed at his brow, how his heartbeat was elevated to rapid palpitations. He held his sword low in a guard laid over his thighs, point held out, taking a slow, patrolling walk along the bordering chain bridge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere below, he reckoned, the beast-thing was idling, wary. It would be too much to hope the fall had surprised Harcress enough to say he’d quickly drowned. Odd pulses of frothy, filmy bubbles rose in collections below the catwalk, over there past the platform supports, sometimes directly underneath Seroth’s thudding boots, taunting. The PA speakers buzzed on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You know, boy,” Cassat said. “Throwing down your sword’s always an option.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…A timed distraction? Seroth suddenly felt an incorrigible tug to turn around. He did so, slicing out as he did. Like a sea-phantom, Harcress rose from the garbage water. He met with the lad’s stroke, taking an ugly, deep gouge through his chest and ribs. Blood was fast to mix and dye the planes and flues of cascading water surrounding his frame as he leapt high. To the lad’s dismay, the stroke didn’t slow the Wolfman. Harcress reached out, plucked the boy up in one hand, and completed his arcing dive back into the waters.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Vulnerability was immediate. Seroth could barely keep his eyes open against the scream of filthy water stinging at his vision, only able to marginally peer through maybe a meter’s worth of range. The pressure as Harcress dove around the base of the platform was a vice around his throat and temples. Coursing motion refused him any allowance to move his arms. Gamely, to his credit, he kept his hold against his vibrosword. It glowed, hissing against the ride of fluid lashing onto the vibro-edge. The hilt-battery was rapidly depleting, dying out in a harsh, electronic squeal erupting in a brief tangle of electric arcs. The jolt fed into the lad’s hand, numbing him from knuckle to elbow. Seroth swore he could hear the Shistavanen laughing as he kicked out powerful hind-legs, swimming round and round at break-neck speed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman wrenched around. With Seroth still clutched in his over-broad palm, he forced the arm into motion. The lad was batted against a piece of submerged iron girding. Air burst past his teeth and funneled out his nose. Even against the drag of water, the impact scored against his shoulders and spine was incredible. Pain, the kind that blinds, shot up behind his eyes. Harcress pulled him back, executed a second batter, again and again as oxygen bubbles thrashed around them. Red light and black rings began to hollow out the lad’s sight. Another impact. He felt something beginning to crack in his hips. Another. His left elbow cratered against some protrusion, metal lip and feeling left his hand. Another. Seroth’s head snapped back and rebounded off the water-treated iron.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcess was laughing. Deep wafts of daft, dim sonics reached him. Despite the thudding note of unconsciousness threatening to overtake his senses, Seroth reacted. Up came his left hand and bracer on a wind-up, Harcress drawing him close again before he drove the lad in against the ferrocrete like putty. The Wolfman turned, looking and snarling into the lad’s face. With all his rage, Seroth snapped up his free pivot-blade from its phantom sheathe in his bracer, gripping it between his knuckles and driving seven inches of plated steel up hard through his snout. The blade stuck, snapping out of his fingers. Now Harcress was screaming.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite the ache of lost breathe in his lungs, Seroth followed up as swiftly as the fogged water allowed. Out came his sheathe-knife. He sunk down until level with Harcress’ flailing knees and gripped onto a thigh, stabbing. The longknife bit into the skin behind his right kneecap, before Seroth crunched both hands down over the pommel and drove it on. The blade savaged alchemical hide, split into the oversized, inflated patella and surrounding ligaments. With another hurtle of strength, Seroth bit onto his untapped anger and wrenched. His longknife split off at the hilt, leaving the blade imbedded through Harcress’ tibia.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood seeping from the Wolfman’s hazarded wounds blew up, clouding the waters like ink had upended into the pool. In the confusion, Seroth clenched his longsword between his teeth and made an effort of swimming up. Arc-lights bathed in with bars of shimmering illumination. He felt his fingers break and swat at air, before pushing in milling swirls to breach his mouth and nose. The lad snorted out gelatinous refuse caught in his nostrils. He sucked up air. Overhead, Cassat was wailing from behind his temporary control-room, blasting his atonal growls across the chamber.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Damn it, you fool-queen Harcress, don’t drown the lad! I’m asking for the last time: do your gods-damned job!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A mountain of skin, fur, flesh, and bone rose behind Seroth as he paddled on the surface. The Wolfman looked nonplussed. He flicked out his arm, battering the lad in his face and chest, bursting gore out the lad’s nose. Then his left hand flashed and took Seroth up by his throat. In his right was the unstuck hidden-blade previously wedged firmly up through the gristle of his snout cartilage. Slowly, making sure the lad had time to brace with dread, he took the knife and began pushing it in through the space between his shoulder and clavicle. Seroth cried out; his sword arm freed from the Wolfman’s slippery grip and lashed out. One blow bit in between Harcress’s eyes, another chopped off his ear down to the root, before Seroth burled a hefty punch into his tender, wounded nose.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aaarrrggh!!” Harcress yowled. Amidst pained growls, he managed to snatch and hurl the lad away, unwittingly tossing him up in a wide sail out of sight. Seroth twisted with the launched and landed with a crunch and a grunt atop the cross-chamber’s central platform.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Breathing was painful. Bone in the curl of his spine and the tendons latched to his ribs felt wrong, overly antagonized and sensitive to every range of motion. Feeling was just beginning to return to his left hand, though his vibrosword was still shorted out. Seroth came to a knee, wrenching out the drenched, defective hilt battery still fizzling and shorting out in the pommel. Below, he could hear Harcress making an effort to climb up the cement and ferrocrete face of the platform, haggard-sounding though he’d lost none of his potent rage. A long, hairy paw reached and cracked into the platform lip. Then a second. Harcress was halfway through hauling his torso up when Seroth stood over him, his tomahawk freed and idling in his palm. It then fell and went through three digits on his left forepaw.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aaauugghh, feth you!” The Wolfman roared, shifting up onto the twelve meter space despite hosing small rivulets of alchemic vitae from his devastated knuckles. Harcress had to half-stand on his single good leg; the sheathe-knife was still embedded clean through his left kneecap, blood-slicked, impossible to dislodge on his own. Seroth backed up, shrugging a gruesome crack out of his shoulders, exhausted.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t worry,” The lad grunted. “I’m not done with you yet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Man and monster fell upon each other. Despite a useless hand, the rest of his arm was enough muscular steel to pulp the lad’s skull into a mess resembling strewn pumpkin innards. Cassat was crying out of the mounted speakers, harassing the Wolfman, commanding him tirelessly to ‘be damned careful!’ Harcress wasn’t in much mood to listen. Seroth had ravaged him, crippled one knee, lamed a hand, and all he could smell now thanks to his snout-wound was his own blood. He tucked in a close slash and cut the lad through his belly and waist. Seroth cried out, peddling out of reach and countering with cut upon cut that strobed through Harcress’ right forearm, wrist, poking up through his pectoral in a long stab that punched through the back of his shoulder bone. He wrenched his sword free, showering further gouts of blood, rounding on the Wolfman as they both worked to beat each other into oblivion.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress nearly took his opponent through groin and belly with a cunning under-swing. Yet, Seroth had read into his body motion. The lad was waiting, eyes steeled though his arms trembled, betraying his burgeoning exhaustion. As Harcress missed and stepped forward too far by a pace, Seroth side-stepped twice to his own left. As he worked his feet, the slayer gritted teeth and hands, sore knuckles wringing against water-logged leather gloves. Down, he arced his sword in a perfect, shimmering crescent. The underpowered edge bit into the reinforced hide sheathing over Harcress’ right shoulder socket and attached bone. The hide tried repelling the blow. Defective alchemy gave way. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman’s trunk-arm came away in furious showers of spraying gore and flopped off the platform out of sight. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Time paused, freezing to a sticky slowness that paused both their expressions. Seroth looked on blankly. Harcress was mystified, thin-lips curled back in a confused snarl. Time caught up and sped forward to ram jarringly across their blinking eyes. The Shistavanen loosed one long, pained note of absolute agony before falling over to lie in a thickening puddle of stiff red flowing out around him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No!” Cassat was screaming over the speakers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth strode up to the prone animal pawing uselessly at what remained of his shoulder stump, groaning through dozens of hoarse cusses and promises that he’d make the boy regret the day he was born. The slayer listened for a moment. Heard what amounted to the murderer’s last, gruff confession.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When I… get up…” Harcress murmured through broken teeth and scarred lips. “I’m going… To impale you… On that friggin’ sword… And then… You’re gonna watch… While I… Kill… Every last… Fethin’… Jackanape… In that… Gods-forsaken… Ghetto… Then… I’ll find… Your friends… And then you’ll watch them die too!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad appeared unmoved by the promises. Save for a slight ink of light blooming behind his gaze that ignited his expression into one of righteous fury. No one save himself saw the foot that smashed into Harcress’ jaw and broke it at the hinge. Silenced, the Wolfman watched for the end to come. Seroth pointed his sword down in his hands and rose it high to deliver a killing stab through his eye socket and awaiting brain past. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]However, someone shot the lad through his thigh.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A pink mist screwed out from the perforating wound as the offending round punched out and ricocheted off a platform support. Seroth loosed a guttural howl and turned on his hip, staring across the chamber.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There stood a man atop a higher catwalk looking over him, Harcress bleeding out at his toes, and a greater majority of the flooded cross-chamber. Pain made his sight refuse to focus. Seroth could perceive the interloper: tall, shielded in a long electronic-cloak of some segmented material, beneath that sporting chrome-finished augments bolted onto his chest, arms, and limbs over a body-glove of matte-grey scales. His face was obscured by a module-cowl clamped down over his eyes, nose, ears, over his brow, skull and the nape of his throat. A long, vicious looking vibrosword was snapped over his back in a shoulder-sheathe. The man shrugged and set away a high-powered slug-rifle; the weapon that delivered his shot through Seroth’s leg.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ah – ah – ah –ah. Tha’ boy’s ‘spensive, son. Puttin’ ‘im back together’s one thing. You kill ‘im, tha’s a crispy twenny mill out th’ fethin’ shute. Can’t let you do it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth felt a Midvinter chill turn his spine into a glacier stuck across his back. “…Stenwulf…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad listened to the piston whines in Stenwulf’s exo-skeleton, as he watched the man gauge the launch and drop distance between his perch on the upper catwalk down to the blood-soaked central platform. Thin, pale lips pursed in consideration before he simply hunkered in on himself, knelt in a lunge pose, and then jumped. The grille in his wake crumpled in like a folded bread slice, clattering out and down to the pools below, as the man soared in a curtly tight arc. Seroth felt the concrete under-boot shiver under his exo-weight, crashing, pitting the stone out beneath him in wide web-cracks. The Nowhere Man rose, turning about to look at the Nowhere Son.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Yer awfully quiet, y’know,” Said Stenwulf.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never had much to say to you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tha’ so? Y’send me awf to some pit o’ hell, can’t be bothered t’say summat.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah. I guess,” Seroth answered, holding tight to try and staunch the blood funneling out of his thigh wound. Stenwulf smirked from beneath his cowl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Take it tha’ hurts? Lucky me. Y’stood still, finally.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth felt the wound had pierced him through with a wide hole about an inch wide and perhaps then some. It’d scrapped over the femur, severing several heavy load veins though, luckily, had managed to piss bursting the main femoral artery. He didn’t admit aloud but the pain was incredible. Stenwulf was simply stalling, to watch the lad fish out several medical compresses and slap them around the wound.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeaaah, nice n’ tight. Ain’t gonna lose y’now to some fethin’ infection. Or bleed out. Six months dreamin’ o’ when I’d punch out your brains, be mighty fethin’ dissapointin’, y’know?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf felt dangerous. The lad could sense a tensile rage keeping just bare restraint below the mercenary’s otherwise glacial and outright smugly mocking demeanor, noticing his stock-still poise. With pain subsiding, vision clearing of scorching pain inflicted by exposure to raw sewage water, Seroth could look upon the man in detail. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was housed in a long cape thrown over his over-broad shoulders, patterned in grey, matte hexagonal patterns with inlaid circuitry hinting at some ECW counter-measures. Beneath that he wore a heavy surcoat bossed with small steel knobs and intricate filigree, all woven out of gold metallic threads shimmering as he breathed. Then came his battle-suit proper: thickened durasteel gauntlets pitted with hard-point holo-emitters, the right bracer showing off a length of attached dataslate running lines of situational data. A loose violet jumpsuit was worn over his skin, atop which was clamped and screwed on the polished chrome exo-skeleton augment frame. His head was bound against some attached hardware acting as an oversized visor, though it was an angular piece of sleek steel fitted with multiple camera lenses and even a tightly nestled track-ball that fed further data.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When they first met, the mercenary sported ratty fatigues and an older model exo-frame with joints caked in rust. Like a stray mutt littered with mange. He’d only been dangerous because rage and mental sickness drove Stenwulf to almost superhuman acts of considerable barbarism and cruelty. Backed by an duranium-clad outlook that suggested that everything was gray, morality a joke, and that he was owed every barrel of blood he could let out from anyone unlucky to cross his path. Now, Seroth thought, he didn’t look like a mutt. Stenwulf looked like a nexu chased in gold armour, resplendent for war. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ah can’t rilly… tell you,” Stenwulf said. “Th’ kinna joy tha’ came overh me, when I figured itwuz you back at that swamp. I just got this… anticipation, y’know? Like ah can’t sleep yet, nah nah, ah gotta runna hunred miles ‘fore I feel tuckered. ‘Cuz it was you… Aftah all this time, here, now, on this shiddhole world, it was you. Outta anyone else who coulda come along. T’was you. Devil love me some fate, hahahaha!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The slayer watched the mercenary begin slowly strolling around him atop the platform. He raised a gloved hand fitted over with steel-calipers feeding power into his very fingers. That trackball turned, sticking Seroth to his spot, running over infrared, electromagnetic, and simple image clarity routines, sizing him up. Blood from a wound the lad hadn’t accounted for was trickling down his forehead and off an eyebrow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It was you. And suddenly… Ah figgered this was ‘ow it had all mean’ to come togethah. Never mind that business with Cassat and the pup, nah nah. …Since I saw you aht Slahtiz, thissus all been comin’ togethah. …Cuz I owe you,” Stenwulf said, voice just a dropped, frigid whisper.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For what?” Seroth chuckled, playing dumb. Stenwulf turned his way on his foot.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, hahahaha, ‘for what’, he says! I tell ya ‘what’!” A hand with enough palpable strength to crush in his skull-bone, burst his eyes, clamped down across the lad’s face and hauled him in close. “Fer screwin’ with a good setup! Actin’ like you’re sum… fethin’ mighty arbitah, tellin’ us how to be! Feth you! Feth that sourbawl lil’ conscience that told you to come up and give us a feth in the arse!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was tossed away, landing hard across his shoulder, feeling the traumatized muscle, ligament, and nerves in his savaged thigh squeal behind his mind in pain. The mercenary stood over him, shadowed by an arc-light glare blistering bars of illumination of his shoulders and long hood. “Contruum, boy. After tha’ shot y’took on Tund, getting’ up from tha’ I thought you’d have fethin’ sense to go lie low. No. ‘Stead? Y’come barrelin’ after us, axe an’ knife, butcherin’ a hunnerd fighter’s I’d kill a thousan’ o’ you to have back. Wha’ gave you the roight?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Right?” Seroth muttered, coming to his feet. “No right… Just that you were slaughtering… Resistance fighters. Men and women… with a right… to defend themselves… against regimes trying… to plunge… their world… into the dark ages. And because I saw the body counts, Sten. I looked all the shot up massacres you and those bastards did. You were murdering people, Sten. Ordinary people! With no guns, no grenades, just scared children and houses shut up with flakboard!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“S’called doin’ business, y’brat,” Stenwulf snarled. “S’called affectin’ war. Y’never could wrap ya head ‘round it, could ya, Seydon?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A beat. Seroth stood back, staring with nova-piercing eyes at the mercenary. “…Why are you here, Sten?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I left you bleeding out on Contruum. Last I looked, you were hung out to dry. War criminal. They took you and threw you away into some prison to spend a few decades thinking about why it’s wrong to shoot children and their families.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not jus’ ‘any’ prison, boy! Greyram!” Stenwulf exclaimed, flying spittle at the lad. “Penal Colony Numbah Eight-Two-Bee, Maximum Penitentiary. The ‘Dungeon’ they call it. Worst prison on tha’ mud-ball.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shook his head. “Those are details but not what I asked, Sten. Why are you here? What’s this murdering animal to you? Cassat as well? …Who broke you out and who hired you to come here? Where does Stenwulf figure into all this: traps, monsters, conspiracies.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The other devil himself broke in on the speakers. “Mister Stenwulf? Might I remind not to let the whole cat out of the bag? This is looking fun, for a change, and we’ve not even come to the best part.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh aye, aye,” Stenwulf answered, shrugging with a mope of frown on his lips. “Well, boy, y’heard ‘im. Not much I can tell ya on threat ‘o pain an’ misery. Suffice to say it: you’ll fyne out soon enough. …What Ah can say is… Izzat all this is a perfect arrangement of details findin’ a way to mesh,” He said, hooking his gloved hands together. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What do you mean?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y’been hangin’ out widdat other one? Ajax’s ‘is name? See… It was figgered he was the only wan with the necessary know-‘ow to make this ‘ole ennerprise worth burnin’ through all those beasties. All th’ ‘assle, grabbin’ folk, turnin’ ‘em into meat, so on, so forth, y’seen it for yerself. …But then the big ambush goes to pot because it’s your unlucky arse. …I look at the cam-feed for the whole screw up. Ah see your face. Suddenly… It’s not such a disaster. Facts start to fit. I tell the boss – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cassat coughed pointedly on the PA, listening in.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“ – About you. ‘Bout our peculiar relation. …How I want to rip ya spine out ya mouth, ‘cause o’ the wrong done to me. Don’t snort, Ah’m not wrapped up yet. So… Compared to that other devil, fethin’ witcher, you’re the easiah prize~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blinked, sweating against pain racking up his ribs, back, and hip. Stenwulf smiled in a grim, vicious expression glowering beneath his facial-attachment. The mercenary leaned up a little closer. “’Cause rilly, it ain’t got much to do wit’ you at all… But you and Shev Rayner.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What’s Shev got to do with this?” Seroth gnarled beneath his breath, one hand still clamping a compress over his thigh, though blood was leaking onto his glove-palm. “You murdered him, Sten. What do you want with him now?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The mercenary shrugged, drawing back and tugging off his shield-cape. He stretched back his right-arm and tugged the waiting sword free from its lacquer-black sheathe, showing off a long, gently curved blade flickering with blue-on-blue cascades of rioting vibro-electric power. It was an impressive tool, custom made, fitted with an ergonomic hilt that rested with chilling comfort in his hands. Seroth could hear his exo-suit whirring, charging with power-currents.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s wha’ you’re gonna tell us, Seydon,” He said. “’Cuz lemme illustrate a few details y’rilly ought to consider ‘fore you do somethink stupid. I jus’ need an excuse. This lil’ cross-chambah? Electronically shielded~ No comm.-transmissions out, ‘less it’s ours, or we give a go-ahead. No such luck fer you, Ah’m afraid~ Yer on yah own… Ain’t no friend with some silly silvah blade gonna come rescue yah. Yer mine in here, Seydon. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So there’s the facts. I’m itchin’ t’give this ol’ exy a good workout. Or… Ya give me that there sword and axe, come quietly, and I won’t shatter you in my hands.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Woefully, it occurred to the lad he hadn’t paused to properly send off the writ-letter he’d penned for Rosa. It sat in its bare, leather envelope, atop the kitchen plasteel table by the porthole window, looking out as Hythe Park wailed as it was sundered of power. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yer all alone now~” Stenwulf taunted.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was forced to lean on his dead vibrosword. Ajax was nowhere in sight. With luck, the lad hoped, he’d caught wind of the mercenary’s presence lurking in the sewer labyrinth and the awaiting hellstorm of Harcress that intended to probably try and cripple them both in the same bout. He was wily, aged, a keener mind that most behind those wolven eyes that, strangely, liked to kindly upon the lad, his friend. Seroth looked up about at the dozen arc-lights beaming down with glaring intensity, all but bleaching his skin, turning the dark, ruddy mess of liquid running down his leg into bright, pop-pink. He couldn’t quite feel his right knee and a numbness had reached his toes. Stenwulf had been apt with his shot, taking away his needed agility.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad was tired, and aching. Harcress had injured something in his backbone that caused a barking refusal to painfully wring up his spine at every wrong movement. Pain ached and throbbed dully in the very pit-center of his brain. Focussing his vision was suddenly difficult for him again. Yet, he could still scent the utterly pungent aromatics of the chamber: drifting bracken below, steel and iron caked with spore nests, faint hisses of cooked air off of Sten’s vibrokatana, the animal stink of Harcress, still alive and still moaning in hurt. Seroth turned, snorted gore from his nostrils and looked across at Stenwulf.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What’s it gonna be?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He’d just married. With Rosa, he’d spent their honeymoon on white sand beaches of far-away Arda. They played in the jungles daily, ate under falling sunsets, and made love atop castles of stone in the midst of storms. Unafraid of rain, lightning, or thunder. The goodbye’s they said to one another were no goodbyes at all; each thought of when they’d see each other again. It seemed inevitable. Assured. Seroth blinked, feeling time begin to slow. The gifted length of leather thong attached to a blunted obsidian ring hung from his throat with damning weight. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf’s visage filled up his sight. Stenwulf. Murderer. Rapist. Slayer of the defenseless, abuser of innocents, because to him there was no such thing. One of the Ten Betrayer’s present on Tund, who’d formulated a plot to steal from the banks of Denon, sold out Dathan Gunn, and manipulated his own wife and Seroth’s mother to shoot him herself. The lad a vision of crushing the fiend’s neck in his hands. Somewhere, he thought he could hear past the long half-mile or so of industrial piping and ferrocrete rock and earth, up above Dromund Kaas, hear and listen to Rosa Mazhar laughing in triumph.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth smiled, looked at Stenwulf, and took his weight off his vibrosword to try and slash him up through his balls and belly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now it was the Mutt who was howling. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their contest was no contest at all. Seroth stumbled forward on one good leg, fatigue thrumming acid-toxins into his musculature. Sten parried the swipe and burled in, colliding a pauldron into the lad’s chest. He fell back, winded, watching in time as the Mutt followed in and shot a slam-punch at his face. It struck his cheek, almost crunching the bone, bowling Seroth back. He shook the bleeding stars out of his eyes and raised up his sword to try address an onrush of falling blows. Stenwulf was no swordsman, but he had sheer power and recognized how to best utilize it. It was a game of leverage. The Mutt struck, pushed the lad’s blade wide and swiped a long cut down over his chest. The tip gouged and opened a long gash from shoulder to belly. Blood leaked out swiftly, spattering inky patterns across the mercenary’s armor. Seroth could only bark out in pain, shifting off his bad leg, trying to roll past Stenwulf’s hip.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Mutt caught him with a hook into his belly, driving air, bile, and pain out past his lips and teeth. The exo-skeleton afforded him incredible strength. At any moment, he could simply rip his opponent in two. Seroth felt something burst inside and a new kind of hurt began to fill him up. Stenwulf lanced down a second strike, gnashing his sword-hand, hilt and all, into the back of the lad’s head. Seroth went down, bouncing off the ferrocrete platform and leaving an impression of sweat and too-dark red on the dusty surface. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He felt hands latch onto his chest harnesses, to haul him up off the floor and hold him high in a kind of wrestler’s triumphant grip. Stenwulf sucked in air so he could loose a long, howling cry as he flung the lad bodily away, laughing as he watched the lad bounce off a platform support column with sickening elasticity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Come on! I waited two years fer this! Git up! Git up!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth did. With an immediate and evident effort of will, he stuck his blade to the ground and used it for a makeshift crutch. One boot found footing, then the other. Another few seconds finally saw him stand as tall as pain would allow and manage. He still hadn’t let go of his sword, since before he met Harcress in martial contest and now, facing down a gauntlet of fresh, despoiling, terrible hurt. Stenwulf was just a dark outline of shivering motion, exo-suit granting him a display of speed that would have left even Ajax impressed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They crossed blades, one hammering back on the other, battering deep notches into the giving durasteel as their faces glowed in the hum of the mercenaries curled blade. Seroth blocked, blocked again and tried shunting against Sten’s guard, smashing his hands up to punch him across his exposed mouth. A lip split. Stenwulf backed away a moment to clear his teeth of bloody phlegm and spittle, not concerned as the lad howled and limped forward, feinting twice before slicing for his throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf simply shrugged, reach up, and caught Seroth’s blade in his hand. There was a groan of power armour thrumming energy into his armour-glove, steel howling as it twisted, warped. With a dramatic clench, the mercenary jinked his wrist and shattered the sword in half. Shards of glittering metal, tattooed with conducting circuitry, scattered in a plume of metallic dust and sparks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ha!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad looked down at his broken half-blade still resting in what remained of the hilt, expression unreadable. Seroth discarded it, tossing it aside, where it clattered off the edge of the platform and splashed down into the waste-water down below. Holding tight to his ruined shoulder, Harcress was still conscious and now laughing with uproarious humour at the sight of his struggling foe. The lad had taken up his tomahawk, trying to keep a slim angle on the attack vectors of his body, turned aside with hands held ready.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]On came the mercenary, bludgeoning vertically, slamming the heat-edge of his sword across the axe-haft. Seroth could feel each impact vibrate and numb him from his knuckles to his throat. It took both hands raised and throwing the axe-beard side to side to grip and turn away every blow. Stenwulf stepped in, keeping his edge crossed against the rapidly melting durasteel, bringing up his knee. Seroth took the impact to his wounded belly, across the rent the mercenary had cut. There was no way to check the howl of broken notes loosing from his haggard throat. It echoed across every bare corner of the chamber, visited by new crunches of steel meeting with flesh and bone. Stenwulf’s blinding speed allowed him to reach in and grip the axe-head in his palm, crushing the metal to a gnarled knob. Seroth felt the implement wrenched out of his grasp and tossed out of sight.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then the Mutt sheathed his blade and pushed the lad against a support column to begin the beating.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth had never trained to enhance his physical power with pure Force power. Now, there was no time to either concentrate or attempt. He tried keep his fore-arms raised, acting on Shev Rayner’s ingrained lessons. Street-kung. Back-alley martial art. Seroth roared and struck back against Stenwulf for every crossed punch, slap, and knuckle-strike. For a moment, the Mutt was bewildered, hammered back by elbows crunching into his clavicle and throat, the one good knee rising up to take him in the soft of his kidney. Seroth whipped a backhand cross, bucking into his opponent’s mouth. One singular molar and a lot of blood briefly showered onto the ferrocrete. Stenwulf turned. His hands snapped up and took up an unrelenting grip upon the lad’s wrists. Up came his boot, kicking Seroth away with enough force to vault him off his boots and crash into the column-support. The impact actually cratered several heavy shards of broken rock off the smoothed surface, falling down beside Seroth as he limply collapsed. Stenwulf extended his reach and lifted him back up to his feet with one hand, walloping a blow across his head that rendered the lad even more stunned.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Mutt was taking revenge for his humiliation at the Contruum square. He’d lost to the boy, who’d been wounded and beleaguered. Almost the whole of his martial prowess had been called into question, along with a few stinging jibes of his manhood being upset by a youth half his age. It did not rain water onto the long platform, but blood. Armour-knuckled hands punched and wrenched into the lad’s body. Ribs snapped, his lungs felt close to bursting, and if he kept hammering into one part of Seroth’s chest, he would push a shard of broken bone through his heart. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet, Seroth caught him again. In his rage, Stenwulf failed to notice his right hand shifting. Out popped his right pivot-blade, where he gripped it in vicious desperation. Seroth leaned back, spat blood up at the trackball and helm-cameras and slugged the mercenary. The hidden-knife slashed cleanly through the meat of his cheek and nose, leaving a long flap of skin hanging loose. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You bastard!” Stenwulf screamed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He punched the lad so hard Seroth wondered why his skull didn’t come apart. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf,” Cassat said calmly from the speakers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad felt a hand reach up and crush every bone in his left hand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Coming around, the Mutt grasped the left wrist, broke that too, hurtled a blow that snapped his radioulnar bone clean in two. A protuberance pierced up through his skin and sleeve.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Another strike connected into his bicep, ravaging the muscle, tendons, crunching the humerus into dislocated pieces. Stenwulf reached for Seroth’s throat and his belt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He raised the lad high over his masked head, braced out one knee, and then brought him down with hurtling, animal speed. Seroth thought briefly about a small hut on an Ardan beach, a little girl with freckled cheeks and dirty blonde hair, sharing Rosa’s smile and his hard, grey eyes. Stenwulf loosed a bestial roar that trembled dust free from their confines in the room, and brought the lad down. Seroth didn’t scream as he was bent around the Mutt’s knee. He hadn’t any air left in his traumatized lungs. What felt like a thousand vertebrae along the length of this backbone tensed, and then gave. His back broke with a wet, spinal snap. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf! You son of a queen, control yourself!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]True, eager pain suddenly swarmed the lad’s vision. A blackout came for him like a daemon in a dream, screaming with hollow echoes along a long tunnel of trembling light and icy-cold. The Mutt let him go as he fell like aside at his feet. Just briefly, he heard another voice speak out over the PA system rigged in the chamber. [/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]Up above, sitting in a shadowed recess, a hooded figure with horrified gold eyes stared in mortal empathy at the boy’s broken form.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf. Enough,” Said a man with urbane tones and bass gruffness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then Seroth knew nothing.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]He thought someone, some person close with terrible breath, had come in and jabbed a thin icicle in through the skin of his throat. Seroth didn’t wish to wake up. He was swimming in a grey sea of vacant sensation, gently aware that he wasn’t right. Occasional nicks of bad ‘feeling’ would wind in to make it difficult to breathe. Was this death? He always imagined the after-life would be a long, Elysium field of endless forests and mountains, jungles that went on forever, rivers that never ran dry; Nat and Guenyvhar Gunn, holding each one another, waving him on to come closer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It wasn’t death. With little apology, cool bursts of bleak adrenaline coursed into the bruised skin of his heart and forced it to beat faster. Unconscious was cruelly dragged away. Seroth awoke, into a dark room where he could not feel his feet, his left arm was a mangled ruin, breathing made him believe blood was welling up in the back of this throat, and he felt cold. Like as if he’d been left to exposure on one of Dromund Kaas’ fresh, young arctic tundras. But instead of the wind coming down from the far-away crag tops, it was gusting out from within his belly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The room was a maintenance equipment locker-chamber turned into a makeshift interrogation space. Tall walls were dirty with sheets of slick, mossy-brown grime leaking down all the way to the flooring. Broken tiles were over-laced with lengths of bundled cable and fiber-wiring, linked into energy sockets belonging to a bank of machinery. An array of monitor stations, backlit keyboards, holograph displays and more glowed a hue of fuzzy, off-blue light in the distance. Someone sat in a high-backed leather repulsor chair. They swung around to look at him and Seroth got an impression of a red, chitinous face with a lipless mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nearby stood Stenwulf. He could tell: tall, plated boots flecked in mud, gore, and blood. A cloak was draped down over his knees and he seemed to turn, just slightly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oi, wakey wakey,” Said the Mutt. “Vermi, he’s comin’ to. Shot’s doin’ it’s trick.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It is?” Came that spidery voice. The figure on his chair stood up and strolled by, kneeling closer to the lad. Seroth became aware he was held up off his knees in some sort of makeshift pillory. Steel-blocks with machined holes for his throat and wrists were clamped around his shoulders. They only bothered to lift up his right appendage: the other just dangled at his side, jangling with the sway of his body, jarring bone shards against tender inner-muscle. Before Seroth could groan in pain, he moaned in horror.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh yes. Terribly beautiful, isn’t it?” Asked Sillian V. Cassat, gesturing at his visage as he stepped down in front of the lad’s eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Whether through a process of torture or an act of self-modification, Cassat had no face. In place of any facial tissue or connective muscle was a single hard skull of red, insect-like plating wedged almost seamlessly. Bony rubs of protruding bumps stuck up here and there, displacing a little of the chitinous growth. It all ran down into a flat, divot impression of a hard-ridged nose, to a lipless mouth sporting rows of yellowed, almost too-long teeth. Barbs and bristles of spiked bone stuck out along the back quarters of his jaw-line, up to where the hinge met the upper skull and hard palate, and out along where there were no visible ears or auditory canals.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Listen to him. Utterly speechless, I love it,” Cassat laughed and patted the lad’s cheek. “Don’t worry. You needn’t say anything, but it is spectacular, no?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never asked, didja do that to y’self?” Stenwulf had slipped out of Seroth’s field of vision, asking after Cassat from somewhere behind him. There was a rustle of metallic piping, tool grip-meshing scraping up against each other. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. An act of devotion, you see. Though I lack eyes, I can see more than even your instrumentation can reveal. Though you cannot note any outward, auditory organs, there’s much to hear~ The powers of alchemy, my friend. You should have allowed me a chance to give you a few cursory upgrades~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahh. Ahh, nah… Magic’s not anythin’ Ah can trust. Too slippery.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Foorsteps. Again, from behind, closing in. Seroth felt something stick in against an intact rib. Stenwulf thumbed on the activate pad for his stun-rod and spent six second electrocuting the lad until he could finally hear him scream loud enough. Smoke wafted off his skin. He became aware that he had been stripped down to just pants and boots, still leaking blood from a gash taken by Harcress’ monstrous talon-claws.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then motion started to rapidly flutter all about. A doorway, off to his left, sighed open on re-greased servos. From the shadows stepped a figure dressed tightly in the elegance of a high-born. Grey jodphurs with extra thigh width fitted into similarly slim boots dressed with some kind of felt, polished hide. A long, thin belt clasped with a buckle showcasing a kind of runic signature, fashioned from platinum. One crisp-white shirt with a black-satin stock resting below a strong, imperious jaw was clothed over the man’s torso, ending in a simple black coat buttoned with silver-caps fixed with carrot-diamonds. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stared up into a face structured with sculptural, hard cheek-bones, sallow cheeks, a fierce brow bristling with hard eyebrows over blue eyes that shone like teal thunder. He’d combed back an unruly, harsh widow’s-peak of black-jet hair. On the man’s hip rested a lightsaber constructed out of brushed electrum and velvet, diodes and control stubs actual polish, precious gems. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He arrived with an entourage. They were tall figures, though they strode by his side with dancer-like gaits, practiced, smoothed, total motor-control practiced with enviable finesse. It was six in total, three left, three right, each dressed similarly but not exactly. True, each of them were clothed in loose black-matte jumpsuits fastened with harness belts and pads of oiled leather armour upon their knee-boots, chests, bracers, and pauldrons, but no two were suited exactly alike. All wore an impenetrable mask of polished, mirror-like Myrkr steel, filigreed with individual patterns denoting differing, set identities. Long-swords lay sheathed at their hips. None of them made a sound or even indication they were breathing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After a moment, looking at one another, the nobleman broke eye-contact and turned to Stenwulf with a severe glare. The Mutt flinched. “I gave exacting instructions that I wanted the boy recovered in optimal condition.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sorry,” Muttered Stenwulf.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sorry,” The nobleman didn’t step away but hardened his glare. Seroth felt his temples pulse; Force power was being exuded, in frighteningly vast amounts. “Is not any sort of excuse of ill professionalism. That’s one million off for every broken bone, Stenwulf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth!” He swore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“At the very least, my Lord Inquisitor,” Cassat strolled to come up to the man’s side, between a pair of his guards. “He is able to retain consciousness. The revitalization serum is taking effect but his strength is ebbing. I fear we’ve not much time, currently.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You forget. I ever need only a few moments.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The nobleman knelt down so as to come to the lad’s sagged level as he hung from the repulsor pillory. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth and a terrible pain-sweat had begun beading over the skin of his bare chest. Seroth listened to the man sigh, drag out a long scarf, and dap away at the mess across his chin, brow, and throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Pity. Such a damned pity. When we last saw each other, you were no bigger than up to my knee and loved to play with the practice swords.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth felt his eyes widen but he couldn’t turn his neck. To do so would bring on more agony. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And then we had to leave you. A very unfortunate necessity. It was a waste on your father’s account but Dathan Gunn was nothing if not totally adamant. I’ve never met anyone quite like him since. He was another damned pity.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… Don’t… Know you…” The lad sputtered weakly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, you do. You simply do not remember,” Replied the Nobleman. “Because I remember you quite fondly. First born of Dathan and Guenyvhar, promised for leadership. One day. The Sayda were your inheritance. I’m told you rejected that. Did you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ffff –“ Stenwulf peeled close and reached to yank the boy up by the short of his hair. “Didja? Huh?? Didja?? Didja piss down all our throats, eh, Seydon?? Izzat what Contruum wa – Oafgh!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A slap of telekinetic force shoved Stenwulf away and across the room. The pulsing in the lad’s head only worsened, and the hard yank on his too-tender head had moved some vertebrae about in such a way that he felt close to violently puking. Reaching, the nobleman settled his head down and massaged into his throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not yet. I know you wish to be sick, but not yet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who are you…!?” Seroth gusted in lieu of vomiting.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Ahhhh, well, you were young,” He scratched over his goatee, then straightened his shoulders. Seroth wondered if he’d ever be able to mimic the motion again. “I have a few aliases, but the most consistent in many decades has been Borja Sennex. You can know me as that, young Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sennex…” He turned the name over on his tongue. Seroth would remember it, if by some long chance he would survive the next half hour.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. And Stenwulf you’ve already been long acquainted with. Cassat as well, just now. Charming fellow. A little heavy on self-aggrandizement but competent otherwise. Harcress is – ?“ Sennex looked to Cassat for confirmation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man with a reddened insect-skull and bare teeth shrugged. “In for surgery. Stabilized. He’ll live but he’ll be very pissed off for a while.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good. Let him stay angry. With luck, he’ll internalize it and come to a realization that he’s not as mighty as he’s assumed. Practice. And more practice. Is that not right, young Seydon?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blinked, grey in the face. “What… Do you want…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To the matter then,” Sennex leaned in. “I’ll take away some of your guess work. By now, you’ve come upon the fact that a small operation has been in happening here, in Hythe Park, and a few other hotspots across this freezing world. It’s not a random happenstance of monsters meeting civilians. It’s probably had you confused. It must go against your usual grain for pure hunts, just you and whatever beast is on the other side of some dark vale.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y-Yeah… Y-Yu-Yes…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good, good. The reason for it all is because I couldn’t otherwise find a man who’s been rebuffing my efforts to contact him. You know him. The Dunaan ‘Ajax’, a witcher. Remarkable, isn’t he? Powerful… More than a match for any of my esteemed Aay’gala,” Sennex swept his arm out behind him to highlight his impassive bodyguards. “And what does that say of these Masterblades? Really. If Ser Ajax had not been so confoundedly against decent company, we would not be here. People would have been hunted and devoured, this great fiasco nipped precisely in the bud. Now I have more blood about than I know what to do with. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then you came along and somehow managed to unwittingly foul up a great deal of planning in a single night. But just imagine for a second, at my reaction when our mutual acquaintance Stenwulf says it’s you,” Sennex had fallen into a close, conversational murmur. “The boy we left on Tund. The last Gunn. Our nowhere son. And he tells me… you were Shev Rayner’s favourite.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev…” Seroth groaned.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s surprising how much that miserable old Legionnaire had himself caught up in,” Sennex said, coming off his kneel before the pillory. “The stories we listened to him tell, years on end. He never liked me. He told me so on a great many occasions. Yet, I did earn his respect for being at least the most dangerous, swaggering fool out of the whole gangly bunch. Ahhh, me… For days when it was just about idle wealth,” He chuckled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To wit, Mr. Rayner has become a sort of odd balance point in this drawn out affair.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood fell off Seroth’s nose, welled and then swam up the lip of one nostril, stinging. “Auughh…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stay with me, lad,” Sennex said urgently. “We are almost there. Rayner. He told you how he travelled. Sixty years, up and down the whole of the Outer Rim. A remarkable sojourn, adventures worth volumes and volumes in the telling. Yet I know… I know in that time he met with another individual, stranger than him. I have it on very good authority that Shev Rayner spent ten years in the company of a wolf-eyed man named Ajax.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad felt his eyes beginning to widen in avid realization. “N-No…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And in that time… It’s recorded they ventured together, out of sight, out of mind, past the Galactic plane. Somewhere. And in turn… Shev Rayner, with his copious scrawl, kept a great many journals regarding details of that venture. I can only conclude… That he went with Ajax to Ys. The armory, the place of repository, Ys!” Sennex began exclaiming. “Castles in the sky… Yet, alas, Mr. Rayner is dead, in no small thanks to Stenwulf’s unforeseen bungling."

Stenwulf loosed a long sneer edged with contemptuous venom across at the lad. Sennex went on. “But Stenwulf told me, young Seydon, that before Shev Rayner died he took one last apprentice. We’ve ventured to Tattooine. The caverns are bare, the Sand People at last had their way. Yet… All those many chests I knew Rayner so fond to keep all those unassuming, dusty notepads and books locked away in. There was no evidence of their destruction. And Stenwulf swears that he and the remaining Sayda made a quick retreat, taking much… but not those chests. Not those accounts of the Road to Ys, young Seydon.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You did,” Those awful, teal eyes peered in at the strung up lad, pressed nearly nose to nose. “You took them. You must tell me where you have them.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That was the matter. Shev Rayner, Gods both bless and damn his soul, had left Seroth with a tumultuous inheritance that would either make or break him in the next telling minutes. He tried to recall every shard of warning advice from Ajax; nightly contemplations warning about the danger inherent to discovering this far away myth-place. Seroth thought he was walking along the edge of a precipice, vaults of eternal darkness lunging up at him either side. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No…” Seroth finally murmured after a while.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The mercenary Stenwulf came striding in on hot anger, leering down at him. “Wha’ makes y’think y’can refuse us? Yer gonna die, uthahwise.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If you haven’t killed him already,” Cassat muttered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And wha’ was that - ?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shut up,” Sennex commanded with a mental jar of Force power. “Why not?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can’t… Ajax… Warned me… What… You want…” Seroth fought to bring up his eyes to glare back at nobleman. “And what… You want… Will burn… Us all…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax is a fool blinded by the paranoid myths his caste has managed to supply him from time immemorial,” Sennex said. “He can hardly be trusted for measured advice. Simply tell me, young Seydon, and upon my word, I will repair you. It is not beyond my power to ensure.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I could always give him a few eugeni – Yes, Lord Inquisitor,” Cassa weeded himself out of the conversation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon. I sense a great deal of Dathan in you, but do not cling to his stubbornness. It will not save you here. Only I can.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Were you there…? …On Tund…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Grey eyes blank with a realization of rage blinked up at Sennex. “You… slew… my family. You… took… From me… From others… Their families. Futures…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh my boy, if only you knew,” Sennex said out of frustration. “If only!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’ll tell you this, Borja…” Seroth managed to murmur without pause, though the effort was considerable. “I don’t have much left… Of who Shev Rayner was. Or… Who my father was… My mother shot me… I was left for dead… And you came here… And caused the deaths of… Of… five hundred and more people… Trying to survive… In the wake… Of that inept bastard Larraq… And his need… For overkill… I owe it… To the dead… To find some way… To strangle the lot of you… For what you’ve done…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t think for the dead, Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You don’t know me,” Seroth forced a loose growl over his tongue. “Stop saying that name… My father died… You killed him… With your plots… You killed those people… With your plots… I’ll sooner see… Shev in Hell… Than give you anything.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That, it seemed, was all Borja Sennex had been waiting to hear. He just shrugged, rose up to his immaculate stature, rubbing off a few fine motes of errant dust that had dared to fall across his white-gloves. Those came off and he tucked them into his belt, settling before Seroth. His hands rose, molding into a set of peculiar shapes that began to encircle an invisible globe that only Sennex seemed able to perceive. The lad could feel a sudden wail of esoteric energy begin to penetrate the interrogation chamber. Cassat began backing up to his banks of rowed, flickering surveillance screens. Some of them milked out. Others cracked and hissed blue sparks. A few just exploded, and electricity coruscated over the keyboards.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Even Stenwulf had enough unnerved sense to turn away from the spectacle of charging power. Seroth could do little but stare up into the maelstrom that was Borja Sennex, High Inquisitor, and a magnificent Sith Lord in his own right. All the veils of concealment he kept raised as a bulwark against outer detection fell away. It was like looking into the eye of Calabed: Ardan hurricane, notorious for its sheer wroth and unyielding energy. The Dark Side yawned over them all like the maw of a dragon-beast. It was too cold. Ghosts were peering through the stone in the walls, phantasms trailing ectoplasm along the ceiling, poltergeists cackling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Finally, Sennex stepped up Seroth on his pillory and pressed his hands to either side of his head. An evil, writhing sort of energy pressed through the lad’s weak mental defenses before simply shrugging and collapsing them entirely. Sennex bore into his mind with little contest. Seroth could only shake and loose a hoarse note of screaming. Cold lances of starlight pried into his memory and person, sweeping them clean of details, wrenching up recollections, reviewing through years of all the history that made Seroth Seroth in mere, blitzing seconds. The effect was utter, and terrible. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When the Inquisitor finished, Seroth was nonsensical. He slumped against his restraints, light smoke pooling out of his mouth, though it was a strange effect of the black energies. Sennex had left his mind intact, though violated. The nobleman sighed, rubbing at his nose-bridge. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The amount of you pain you’ve bore up…” Said the Inquisitor. “Remarkable. Simply remarkable. And all those doubts. …But we are done. Cassat?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Black Vermillion coasted up on short legs. “Lord?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ready our beasts and return them to their kennels. We make ready for travel. We’ve somewhere to find called ‘the Levantines’. ‘Free space.’ ‘Arda.’ Not any places I’ve quite heard of.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mi'Lord!” Cassat turned away and disappeared out the same doorway Sennex had entered initially. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What about ‘im?” Stenwulf asked, pointing with his vibrokatana. Seroth was a limp bundle of broken bones and skin almost hued red by heavy bleeding. The only sign of life were his long, ragged gasps forcing his lungs to move against broken ribs. Sennex considered him for a long while.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I have what I need. I won’t waste resources. Do what you will with him, but be swift,” He said archly. “I don’t have time to indulge in whatever pain fetishes you’ve been meditating upon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh… Don’t worry…” Stenwulf sauntered up to the lad and gripped his blank face up by the rough of his chin. “It’s all planned out…”[/SIZE]