Redmane did a quick count of heads.

  Apart from the squad Sheriff Kard had just blown into incoherence with a single swing of his axe, there were five more small formations of Numantians moving to encircle him. From his vantage above it all, he could see there would be more on the way as well. The Numantians were thorough. They brought more than enough force to deal with the population here.

  But not quite enough to overwhelm them completely. Perhaps they had miscalculated.

  It would be gratifying to disrupt their calculations a second time.

  Redmane looked about for a leader, someone he could dispatch to throw them into disarray, but none stood out. Either the Numantians didn’t wear obvious signifiers of rank, or they didn’t have any. The first seemed more likely than the second, but he didn’t know either way.

  He noticed they all resembled each other. They did not appear to be identical copies of the same person, but they could all have been brothers or cousins. Which would make for a sizable family indeed.

  Legionnaire

  First Generation Imbued

  Level 185

  Ah.

  So they were something like the Sicari. Something less than human. But the Sicari were distinctly inhuman in their appearance, whereas these legionnaires looked just human enough to fool a passing glance but not direct inspection. It was possible they were automata, given orders or directly controlled from afar.

  He’d have no qualms destroying them indiscriminately then.

  [First Generation Imbued] marked as Prey

  Redmane continued in his gliding descent, chose a rooftop at the far end of the village and alighted upon it, dismissing his wings and crouching down to keep a low profile, even though no one was looking his way.

  Time to test his new weapons.

  The Flame of Redmane would be first.

  Below, in the square, he chose the nearest group of legionnaires marching in formation toward Kard and what remained of his beastmen kin. His first instinct was to gather two lungfuls of air and breathe it down on them like a dragon, but there was a better way. One which would not give away his position.

  As he watched the backs of the Numantians, he felt the stirring of that presence inside him. The Beast Within. A construct of Gnosis giving sapience to his baser urges. Redmane felt its eagerness to kill, to rend, to burn and devour.

  So he let it off its chain.

  Flame of Redmane

  Gnosis: 1291

  It flew into the body of a Numantian legionnaire.

  This one stood at the center of his shield line. So when he doubled over screaming, blood and smoke and crimson-violet flames flying from lacerations bursting forth all over his body, his comrades on either side recoiled from him with mild shock on their faces.

  Corpus: 14,252

  Wrath (3)

  Redmane’s eyebrow rose.

  Corpus: 15,209

  Wrath (6)

  Corpus: 16,201

  Wrath (9)

  He realized what was happening.

  Each moment the flame burned the legionnaire’s body it dealt damage, inflicted a stack of Burning and a stack of Venom. And since the Flame was so closely tied to the central node of his powers, it fed on his behalf.

  Redmane hadn’t realized what he’d created until this moment.

  This was power on another level. A truly unfair development for his enemies.

  It was going to be even more difficult to hold back now.

  Flame of Redmane

  Gnosis: 1191

  Flame of Redmane

  Gnosis: 1091

  He burst the two legionnaires next to the central one and they too erupted into screams and blazing wounds inflicted by phantoms within their own bodies. The remaining seven fell back and reformed, closing ranks, their eyes scanning around for the location of their assailant.

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  Corpus: 19,939

  Wrath (18)

  Corpus: 22,359

  Wrath (27)

  Corpus: 25,744

  Wrath (36)

  Redmane’s body shook with the power flooding into it.

  He imagined this might be what it was like to be struck on the head by a bolt of lightning in the middle of a raging storm.

  His third eye opened.

  And for a moment, or perhaps for hours, he had visions.

  He stood on a barren world, facing the mighty guardian of a tomb, the skeleton of a giant, wielding an immense hammer of black iron. He waved his hand and the Flame of Redmane engulfed it whole.

  The gates of a mighty fortress towered above him, eclipsing the descending sun. His fist became something like a spiked mace as he struck those gates, blowing them wide open as if a siege ram had been battering them for hours.

  A battlefield stretched out across the horizon before him, and at his gesture the ground became like pitch, darker than night, and both armies sank into the Abyss.

  There were more, but they were shorter. Flickering images of Redmane liberating worlds single-handedly, burning down entire legions, closing in on the nexus of power itself.

  It looked like a Prism…

  Corpus: 31,404

  Wrath (54)

  Redmane snapped out of it.

  He’d have to figure out how to get those oracular events under control. Not that they weren’t useful. They just arrived at inopportune moments.

  First he had to do something with all this Wrath, or he felt like he might explode.

  Wrath (0)

  +100 Might

  +100 Grace

  +100 Fortitude

  +100 Armor

  +100 Evasion

  Attack Speed Up (x4)

  For thirty seconds he would be the supreme force in the world of Volos. If he wasn’t already.

  He leapt from the roof and landed before them, and as he charged he could not help but note how slow they were to react to him or even track his movement. It was as if the entire world slowed except for him. So when his claws landed, they landed wherever he wished, and when they encountered armor they sheared through it as if it were paper.

  Wrath (8)

  The squad of seven fell in the space of a heartbeat. He’d struck at such speed that they simply flew into shreds of blood and flesh and armor, and he was gone before their pieces had even touched the ground. In fact the blast of air from his departure at superhuman speed blew gore and fragments of arms and armor all over the street.

  Redmane was about to discover how much violence he could compress into thirty seconds.

  Around the corner he encountered a fresh group of ten legionnaires, who had been marching toward the town square. They were facing away from him, only just now turning to react to the sound of fighting somewhere behind them. Only one of them had eyes quick enough to focus on Redmane, though it did him little good.

  He put those eyes out with a claw across the face.

  He swept his arm across three of them and for an instant it became a blade that cleaved through their torsos and shields.

  He flurried on the rest, and his limbs were briefly elastic, whiplike, fluid in the moment of transit to their targets and harder than steel at the instant of impact.

  Wrath (34)

  Ten legionnaires died before any of them could even raise their voices in alarm.

  Their deaths gave Redmane the fuel he needed to keep his godly Wrath in motion.

  He sprinted fast enough to blast the streets clean of loose dust, leaving hard packed earth behind.

  When he shredded squads of Numantian legionnaires, their parts struck the surrounding buildings hard enough to do structural damage.

  He came upon a cornered pack of beastmen, six of them backed up against the end of a dead end street, two squads of Numantians closing in on them with their shields locked together. None of them saw him charge up behind their ranks.

  Redmane speared one through the back and threw him.

  His neighbors to the left and right ate claws to the back, which chopped them neatly into several pieces each.

  The next flurry projected out from the tips of those claws, a trick stolen from the God Breaker. And eight bodies became forty assorted body parts hailing around him through a shower of blood.

  One beastman appeared to become aware of what was happening. It was strange watching his face begin to register surprise in slow motion.

  Stranger still when it occurred to Redmane that he could go even faster.

  He struck the helpless legionnaires on the opposite side, and as his claws rent through flesh and steel he focused on how different it felt to fight in this way. His heart thundered in his chest, as it always did in battle. And he had the taste of blood in his mouth, hot and coppery.

  But the savage euphoria of fighting felt dampened by this sheer speed. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad outcome. It was far simpler to focus on things. On striking precisely where he wanted his claws to land.

  He could bisect a legionnaire from groin to scalp, and then quarter him by clawing across the waist.

  He could strike off one’s head, and then strike that head into five pieces as it popped free from the neck and spun in the air.

  And as he watched those pieces separate from each other in slow motion, he had time to pause and reflect on what he was doing.

  Saving his world, one eviscerated legionnaire at a time.

  The Seal of the Kirin was near, but this was a worthy distraction.

  But there were none left to dispatch here, so he leapt over the building in front of him and carried on. The force of that leap blasted gore all over the walls of the dead end and the pack of bewildered beastmen, but they would be alright.

  In order to sack the town, the Numantians had broken their numbers into these small squads of ten to sweep its streets and corral the outnumbered beastmen toward the town square. This would have been a successful strategy if Redmane hadn’t intervened.

  On the other hand, he could have engaged them on an open field with their force fully massed and prepared for battle. It mattered not.

  This just made it more like a hunt.

  Which was his preference anyway.

  Redmane made his way toward the village square, crisscrossing the streets leading there to dispatch every pack of Numantians he came across, moving at such speed that his prey could barely perceive their doom approaching, let alone do anything about it. Their slaughter stoked his Wrath further, propelling him toward the next set of foes, and the next.

  Until at last, he barreled into the village square to join Sheriff Kard in battle.

  No sooner did he sprint around the corner did the beastman leader notice him out of the corner of his eye in the middle of a swing of his great axe. His eyes shifted, momentarily focused on him and his eyebrow rose.

  Impressive.

  He ran up behind a group of Numantians and stomped the ground.

  The earth shook.

  This took place in slow motion, however, so the startled legionnaires did not fly through the air as they would if his perception of time was moving at its normal flow. Their feet barely left the ground before claws slashed them apart. But the added velocity would surely send their pieces flying at much greater speed.

  The next pack fared the same, except they were far enough away from the epicenter of the stomp to merely stumble around rather than fly upward.

  He noted with amusement that even Kard staggered from its force.

  And finally, when the Numantians were dead to the last man, Redmane let the effects drop and he stood before the Sheriff of Magas Village. Who stared down at him with plain shock written all over his face.

  Redmane bowed. “Well met.”

  PATREON