The Mongrel had no time to respond to Mercy's transmissions, but he trusted her to be able to proceed without his guidance. If she was already inside the 500 Republica, perhaps about to run up against the likes of
Atlas Drake
, she was about to get reinforcements in the form of a substantial Scar Hounds strike force; all of the other speeders were still on their way, after all. It was only the warlord's own vehicle that had been brought down. Random bad luck, or a targeted attempt to take out the Mawite leadership? He couldn't be sure which.
But his warriors were strong. They'd be fine without him.
It was almost a relief to be thrust into the thick of the fighting, all of the logistics and tactical concerns he'd been considering moments earlier pushed aside in favor of simply surviving and escaping the situation. Just as his speeder had literally been brought down from the sky, he had been figuratively dragged back to ground level. Down on this war-torn street it did not matter that he was The Mongrel, Warlord of Mar'zambul, Chieftain of the Scar Hounds. He was a marauder again, a simple warrior of the Brotherhood surrounded by deadly foes.
Quickly he took stock of the situation, his blazing visor sweeping across his immediate surroundings. Two of the auxiliaries were dead, thrown headlong from the speeder to land hard on the unyielding pavement - or headfirst in the hardening glop, equally fatal to anyone who needed to
breathe. "Iggy" was bloodied and disoriented, spitting up crimson foam from beneath his crooked nose, but mercifully did not seem to have broken anything. That was good; they would need him to drive once again, and that would be difficult with injured limbs.
The fourth auxiliary was more lucid, having avoided a knock to the head, and was fighting through the pain of a compound fracture to the right arm. The Mongrel nodded his approval to the man; the bravery and endurance he was displaying, providing covering fire and helping move Ignatius despite his terrible wound, was indeed worthy of the Brotherhood. He would be celebrated if he survived to the end of this day, and he would be honored by the Three Avatars if he did not. The warlord could work with this. The three of them could escape.
Or if they could not, they would at least die well.
The Weequay auxiliary asked what the plan was, and The Mongrel began to formulate a reply. He had no intention of waiting for rescue; that would be conduct unbecoming of a Warlord. Let other militaries expend unnecessary resources to rescue their fragile, weak commanders. He was not just a warleader, he was a
warrior first. If he could not fight his way out of this situation, he was unworthy of the position. Multiple times he had been delivered from death's grasp as if by the hand of the Avatars themselves.
Either it would happen again, or... Well, he was not afraid to enter paradise today, if the Avatars so willed.
But before he could make any reply, another voice cut in.
"You die, and join your ugly bastard friends in the Nether." The Mongrel's gaze snapped to the source of the sound, and he beheld a man dressed all in white, bounding up the street in his direction. In his gloved hands, the cloaked man held a laser-sword... and not any ordinary one, but the sort called a "saberstaff". He could only be a sorcerer, not just for that weapon but because he moved with inhuman speed. There was only an instant in which to react to his imminent arrival.
The Mongrel moved swiftly, but he was calm despite the danger. He had faced countless mage-knights by then - Jedi, Sith, Witches, adherents of the strange Force traditions of the Confederacy and New Imperial Order - and knew no fear when confronted by one on the battlefield. He dropped his pistol and reached to his side, grasping the hilt of his
dread blade. An instant before impact, the weapon - its crackling red blade generated by a mangled shard of kyber crystal stolen from Ilum - sprang up to intercept the alabaster-clad foe's attack.
The warlord was not
quite fast enough. His dread blade deflected the saberstaff strike upward, keeping the shimmering silver of the weapon from cleanly running him through... but a flash of the saber's argent tip slashed through a chunk of torso between shoulder and neck as it passed. For any ordinary man, the fight would have ended there. The pain of the saber burn would have been almost unbearable, and vital muscles and ligaments would have been severed, leaving the left arm useless. But The Mongrel was not any ordinary man.
Ever since his marauding career had begun, the warlord had been rapidly accumulating grievous injuries... wounds that he had repaired with more and more cybernetic enhancements. When Ziare's point-blank shotgun blast had shredded his torso back on Carlac, only his durasteel ribcage had saved him - itself an enhancement to save his life after his
original ribs were crushed by a Gundanbard mace on Mar'zambul. There had been no point in salvaging the ruined flesh of his chest. His entire torso had been replaced with a metal exoskeleton.
His spine and organs swam in nutrient fluid within.
The saberstaff blow melted through the metal of that exoskeleton near its top, but The Mongrel did not even
feel it beyond a dull sense of impact and a warning whine of inbuilt sensors. The glancing blow certainly didn't slow him down. He took one step back, to get some distance, and brought his other arm up to join his dread blade in a guard position. After
Ishida Ashina
had used her razor-sharp katana to cut cleanly though his cybernetic arm back on Kinoss, he'd looked into ways to keep that from happening again.
The warlord now wore saber-resistant
vambraces on each forearm. Plundered from the destroyed Jedi Enclave on Jakku, they were his favorite trophies yet.
"Find us transportation," The Mongrel ordered Ignatius and the Weequay. He trusted them to be able to hotwire a civilian speeder or hijack a military one, even under fire; both had proven themselves to be survivors, even in extreme circumstances, and he was counting on them to keep up that streak.
"I will deal with this." He did not grant his foe the courtesy of a response to the taunt he'd begun the fight with. Instead he simply fell into the rhythm of battle, preparing himself for the rigor of surviving a fight with yet another demigod.
Jedi and their ilk were hard to kill. Their weapons were one thing - you could learn ways to deal with lightsabers, and The Mongrel
had - but their magic was another entirely. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which specific spells each sorcerer wielded; The Mongrel had seen an
incredible variety of powers, attacks and defenses alike, capable of simply
cancelling out all manner of clever tactics and sophisticated technological solutions. He had come to assume only that he should make no assumptions. There was no telling what each foe could do with the power of their mystical Force.
Not without testing their limits in battle, anyway.
So the warlord resolved to do just that. With his left arm, still raised in a guard position, he pointed one cybernetic finger... not at his opponent, but at the crashed speeder, mired in the hardened glop. There was still fuel in the craft, leaking slowly out through the crushed engine compartment. Grinning behind his durasteel mask, The Mongrel clenched his fist. The tip of his mechanical index finger folded back toward his palm, as if grievously broken... and a small dart shot out from within his finger. It was an incendiary, and it was headed right for the growing pool of leaked fuel.
The warlord leapt down the hill of hardened glop, rolling over his shoulder as he hit the pavement. He came up on his feet, his left arm and dread blade once again raised in a guard; the weapon had left a molten groove in the street where it had cut into the duracrete when he'd rolled. Behind him, the fiery little dart struck the fuel and raced up the trickle, straight for the engine compartment. Within seconds it would burst, showering the whole area with fire and heated shards of speeder chassis. Hopefully that would put the hurt on white-cloak.
And hopefully
not on the escaping auxiliaries.
Constantine Oliva
| Qellene Tyliame
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