The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART FOURTEEN

The monster grunted loudly and stumbled, its front legs collapsing as it pitched the underside of its huge torso onto the street as it fell. The huge body slid from the velocity of its charge. As it smashed to the ground, its rangy, towering rider fell from out the stirrups of his saddle-cradle and tumbled heavily onto the street wailing. The fallen rider rolled and awkwardly tried to regain its footing, failed, and then sat dazed and disoriented from the impact. The beast's sudden plunge threw the collection of umbilical-connected flea-wolves high into the air. They fell, yanked down in the collapse, slapping heavily onto the hard surface of the street, their segmented carapaces bursting open and oily mucoid liquids seeping out to puddle in the debris. The dying beast briefly moaned, but the sound was cut off as another destructive beam of light punched into its misshapen hybrid skull.

Mune'stahr fired off the last of his grenade cartridges at the remaining monster, but its mysterious, otherworldly rider had turned it away from its charge at he and Pylott and the explosives concussed ineffectually in mid-air, the shockwave rolling back at the seasoned Star Legion SpecOps trooper. He and Pylott instinctually raised and crossed their arms to stave off the effects of the multiple blasts.

Following the rider's line of sight, he and Pylott finally noticed the man emerging from the haze and gloom. Taller and broader than Mune'stahr, they did not recognize the armor he wore nor the symbolic icon-designation on the armor's chestpiece. But Mune'stahr had recognized the exemplary vintage of the weapon the man had used against the monster. It had been outlawed for military use nearly a decade ago: a defractor-level pistol called a shatter-bolt. You don't wound anything with a defractor ray. You demolish it. No one was allowed to carry the things.Mune'stahr noticed the man wore two of them, one holstered on a belt at the hip and the other in a shoulder-rig. But that wasn't what caught his attention as the vigilante soldier strode purposefully towards the remaining monster.

It was the elegant, if evil-looking, twin-bladed shatter-sword in his left fist that caught Mune'stahr's eye. A shatter-sword, another non-qualified, ancient weapon outlawed by the Emperium. It was a sword with twin double-edged triangular blades made from a rare dense, molecularly-hybridized alloy found only in the heart of a comet. When activated by its wielder's telepathic command, it vibrated at dangerous infrasound frequencies, focusing lethal subsonic, seismo-acoustics in a tight, weaponized plane enveloping the metal of the sword's blades.

A very, very lethal weapon.

Standing next to him, Pylott voiced Mune'stahr's thought aloud as the big man, calm as if he were striding towards an evening's dinner, approached the furious, mammoth mutant brute and its hissing, demonic rider.

"Who in all the pits of The Nine Great Hells is that? He can't be what I'm thinking he is, can he? I mean, there's no such thing anymore as a Knight, right?"

"Wrong," Mune'stahr said softly, his grudging amazement evident in his tone.

Standing defiantly in his saddle's stirrups, the inhuman rider snapped his flaming whip threateningly at the armored man.

Unruffled, the Knight walked by the rider's dazed, still disoriented and concussed comrade and casually flicked the sword out in a swift, efficiently brutal motion. The sword's blades sliced through sprawled alien seemingly without encountering any physical resistance at all. The creature stiffened and let out a squawk as subsonic death ripped into and radiated throughout its seated form. The blinding glare emanating from its body quickly faded and then went dark, like a candle's flame abruptly snuffed out. The sword withdrew on the slow upswing, exiting the body in a bloodless arc.

The Knight didn't bother to so much as give the now-lifeless creature a second glance and continued his advance towards the second burning rider and his massive, loathsome mount.

Howling, the rider leaned back on his stirrups and the monster raised up, towering high, extending its flexible, tentacle-like umbilical connectors as it loosed the fury of the flea-wolves attached to it.

The Knight ran forward at a sprint, the sword held in a two-handed grasp, his motion a visual blur as he engaged his armor's exoskeletal muscular enhancements, and he sped around the creature slicing and stabbing at its attacking collection of symbiotic minions with balletic, martial efficiency. Every time one of the appended hound-parasites died, the larger insectivorid mammoth roared its agony. Then, the Knight grabbed hold of one of the now-severed umbilicals and hurriedly clambered up the writhing appendage to stand atop the monster. In a couple of moments he stood atop the beast's back facing the coruscating glare of its rider. The rider swung and kicked at the Knight... to no avail.

The inhuman thing was sliced from shoulder to groin in one unstoppable stroke and the Knight let the motion continue to bury half the length of the dual-bladed weapon into the monster's back.

The startled creature suddenly froze, its primitive brain trying to compute the extent of its injuries even as the vibrations from the sword rapidly magnified them to mortal status, tearing its insides asunder.

It fell, plopping limply to the street, and died. It's rider's halved body, no longer glowing, slid off into the dirt and debris.

The dark and ominous rotating cloud that birthed the cyclonic microburst dissipated like dream-vapor.

The Knight clambered off from the alien beast's carcass and he waved over to a shell-shocked trio of weary uniformed territorial police, indicating it was safe for them to approach. A crew of tousled and disheveled Emergency Medical technicians with equipment cases and floating mag-lev gurneys followed them.

"Please tell me he's an ally," Pylott said softly. "Because if he's not, we're in very serious trouble."

She looked up at her partner. Unbelievable. Mune'stahr was smiling broadly. Pylott raised an eyebrow and shook her head incredulously.

"Men," she thought derisively.