Redmane stood atop the wreckage of a siege machine, the severed head of its pilot in his hand, when his third eye snapped open. He saw skeletal hands crawling at him from every direction. Behind them, obscured by the smoke and flames, the figure of their master observed the scene with two blades in hand, one red, one blue.
The weapons thrummed with power. It felt as though they were the masters of their wielder and not the other way around.
His eye had shown him something like this before.
It meant enemies were near.
No sooner did he have this thought did a dozen Sicari shimmer into existence around him.
They were clad in white cloaks, armed with weapons of gleaming Star-Steel, and they appeared in a full circle around his position, some standing on the ground, some upon large rocks, some in the limbs of trees which hadn’t yet burned down or fallen over in the blaze.
Sicarius Neonate
First Generation Imbued
Level 100
Minions. Foot soldiers. They were a distraction.
The Ancillae were watching, still in concealment. When they thought he was sufficiently distracted, they would strike. His gaze quickly swept across the burning forest around him, but he saw no incorporeal assailants. Perhaps the fire concealed their outlines. Or perhaps they had found some other way to elude his perception.
He would have to feign distraction convincingly.
With the white-hot fury coursing through his veins, far hotter than the meager flames all around him, he did not think it would be difficult.
[First Generation Imbued] marked as Prey
The Neonates waited a moment. And then they moved as one.
Roar of the Beastlord
Gnosis: 296
The wave of force struck them all at the same time.
It blew back the flames in a sphere around them all.
Wrath (18)
They flinched for a moment, took the damage and pressed forward nonetheless, charging and leaping toward him with the single-mindedness of automatons, heedless of the concept of personal danger. The first to arrive was a Neonate who had vaulted down from a treetop. Its curved blade glinted in the firelight as it descended like a bird of prey.
Redmane caught it by the throat with one hand. Snapped its neck with a crunch as he closed his fist.
He pitched its limp body at the next closest Neonate, knocking it flat on its back mid charge.
Then the other ten were on him all at once.
Redmane was lean on Gnosis. He’d have to use it sparingly.
But he didn’t need to use any to fight these things. Not too long ago, in the cave where the great black bear once dwelt, he’d struggled to defeat even one of them. Now they were nothing but fodder.
He ducked and dodged, caught weapons and limbs and either broke them or struck their wielders senseless. His backhand sent one spinning through the air. His kick made one strike a burning tree so hard its trunk split and fell on top of it. A single slash of his claw rent the bodies of two Neonates into twelve ribbons of gore.
Some were quick enough to use Flicker, but Redmane knew the Skill well, having stolen it from one of their own. So the moment he saw a Neonate vanish from the path of one of his strikes, he turned and struck the space behind him without even having to look.
He slipped to the side of a descending blade and caught it by the hilt, twisted it free from its owner's grasp and used it to impale another assailant charging from his left. A swift pivot allowed him to evade a lunging strike, and he responded with a forceful push that sent the Sicari sprawling against a nearby rock. Then he turned and grabbed a Neonate by the face, and hurled it into the flames as if its body were weightless.
Each Neonate that leapt at him met a similar fate — bones shattered, joints dislocated, bodies slashed to pieces with savage ease. His hands moved like striking serpents, like they possessed a ravenous volition of their own, watchful for opportunities and eager to streak in for kill after kill.
Wrath (33)
And while he fought, he kept an eye on the surrounding forest.
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The superior officers would arrive soon. He’d nearly consumed the bait they dangled in front of him.
A ghostly shape moved against the backdrop of a wall of flames. Then there was another.
Redmane realized they had been concealing their incorporeal forms inside the flames themselves. Clever.
He didn’t know if the Ancillae realized he had seen them, or if they simply chose this moment to strike. But they struck, in perfect coordination, from every side and from above. Six of them, with wicked-looking weapons in their hands.
Sicarius Ancilla
First Generation Imbued
Level 200
A serrated scythe, from directly in front, aimed to cleave him from left shoulder to right hip.
A pair of long daggers from the left sought the front and back of his ribcage.
A heavy mace swept at his knees from the right.
A trio of broad headed arrows sought the bottom, center and top of his spine.
A chain whip with barbed links uncoiled from above, seeking his neck.
A twin-bladed staff whipped around horizontally, to cleave him in half at the waist from behind.
Wrath (0)
Damage Ablation +1650
Six weapons of gleaming Star-Steel fell upon Redmane at once.
And barely scratched him.
He didn’t move a muscle. He simply stood there like a statue and let their blows fall. The scythe left a faint line across his front, as did the twin-bladed staff in the back. The arrows bounced off his spine as if it were made of Star-Steel itself, the heavy mace sent its wielder staggering backward, thrown by the force of its own blow, and the twin daggers pinged off Redmane’s skin.
Only the wielder of the chain whip could have said their attack landed. It wound around Redmane’s neck like a noose, but when the Sicari wielding it pulled the chain taut — a move no doubt designed to snap the neck of an offending deity — Redmane didn’t budge.
Instead, he grasped the chain with two hands and wrenched it around to fling its owner through the air. The Sicari held on for a moment, but only for a moment. The sheer speed with which Redmane hurled him made it impossible for the Ancillae to keep hold of its weapon, and more than one of its fellows had to dodge out of its way or be bowled over before it finally lost its grip and went sailing into the flames.
These too were nothing to him now.
He recognized them, from their encounter at the Deepwell Monastery.
That night he truly believed their doom was certain. He’d been taken by surprise, overwhelmed.
How the tables had turned…
The six Ancillae and what remained of their Neonates again came at him at once and this time he didn’t bother with defense. He met their coordination with pure force. For at least thirty seconds their vorpal blades would find no purchase in his flesh.
He used them to smash skulls. Rip bodies in two. Claw off limbs. Bite heads from their necks.
Wrath (11)
Wrath (0)
Might +110
It felt so very good to be strong.
To be beyond the threat of harm from such feeble creatures as these.
From this height of power, he might have been persuaded to spare them in their helplessness. But not this time. This time, they had taken things beyond the point where diplomacy might have been an option for them. The injury they had done to Flora, and to their forest, was an enthusiastic signature upon their own death sentence.
Whoever it was, that hidden figure behind all this, they would be fortunate if he didn’t show them the burnt skulls of their own loved ones.
The Sicari swarmed Redmane, their weapons striking with focus and force and flawless technique, but they failed to penetrate his defenses. Each blow glanced off him, as effective as whispers against stone.
The Skill of the Ancillae, Transposition, gave them the power to switch places with each other every time Redmane attacked, but where before they could use this Skill to press their advantage in speed and surprise and superior technique, they now possessed no advantages at all.
Their scythe, daggers, mace, arrows, whip, and staff met the unyielding surface of Redmane's skin.
And he responded with devastating brutality.
Redmane caught the twin-bladed staff mid-swing, wrenching it free and using it to bisect the attacker behind him.
He sensed a hail of Gnosis-powered arrows streaking down on him and he turned, sprouted an open mouth upon the palm of his hand, and drew the missiles into a howling vortex of hunger.
That same vortex he swung around to intercept two charging Neonates, who were entirely consumed by it in the blink of an eye.
He snatched the pair of long daggers mid-lunge, turning them against their owner by driving them deep into the Sicari's chest, pinning the body to the ground.
He intercepted the serrated scythe, twisting it from the grasp of its wielder, turning to cleave down another Neonate and then use that cruel blade to decapitate its previous owner in one clean stroke.
Bones cracked like twigs under his bare hands. Bodies torn asunder with raw, physical might. Limbs were severed cleanly, flung into the fire-lit chaos of the battlefield.
This was his land. He was the judge. And execution was the verdict, to be carried out with extreme prejudice.
A scream wrenched his mind free from the trance of violence.
Flora.
It came from somewhere nearby. Redmane listened for it, heard the rumbling wheels of a war engine near the source of that scream.
He took off running at such a speed that he might as well have been in flight. Leaping and ducking obstacles as they came at him, inhuman reflexes giving him ample time to master the terrain despite his godlike velocity. He ran straight through walls of flame so fast they blew out, extinguished.
In his peripheral vision he could see what remained of the Sicari pursuing him at impressive speed, flanking him on either side, some of them leaping from tree to tree, as heedless of the flames as he was. Their dull black eyes and expressionless faces fixed on him as their white cloaks whipped behind, singed by the fire.
Redmane came upon the source of the sounds; one of those wheeled war machines rolling toward Flora, who had fled and now found herself cornered at the end of a dry, rocky gully, terror in her eyes as she stared up at its horn-like weapon. Which was aimed directly at her, at a range where evasion would be impossible. She was trapped.
A throwing dagger whistled past his head from the left.
Redmane glanced for its owner, saw there were three Sicari sprinting beside him with such weapons in hand.
Evidently one of them was keen enough to have followed Redmane’s gaze to the gully ahead, where Flora flinched as she heard the chirp of the flame-spitter priming itself. That Sicari raised his arm to hurl a dagger at her instead.
Redmane’s eyes were more than keen enough to track the dagger’s path through the air. It would strike Flora a moment before the fire of the machine engulfed her.
He didn’t know if he was close enough to intercede. The war machine was a goodly distance away still. And the rest of the Sicari with throwing daggers in their hands were now throwing them at her instead of him.
She was about to die, again. By fire or Star-Steel.
PATREON
