CRACK!

  The sound of wood snapping and splintering under the force of a lone blade resounded through the woods outside Leona. Once more, the greatsword struck a sturdy chunk of oak, cleaving it in half. After tossing the pieces onto a large pile beside him, Gareth placed another block on the old stump and wound it back for another swing.

  Nelly chased a butterfly hovering around the wood pile, scampering after it on all fours as it fluttered its wings desperately. As the insect ascended, so did she, climbing up the mound of firewood in a fit of excitement.

  “Nelly, I told you not to-!” Gareth called out, interrupting his wood chopping to attend to the demon child. His concerns only grew further when some of the blocks under her began to roll down the pile, causing a miniature wooden landslide and bringing Nelly down with it.

  Gareth picked Nelly up by her arm, freeing her tail from the pile before chastising her. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from the timber?”

  “I was just hungry!” N’elskaerm protested, glaring at Gareth with watery eyes. “Do you want me to starve!? I need to eat more so I can grow big and strong like Papa!”

  “Yeah, yeah… fine,” Gareth relented, letting her down next to the loose pile of chopped wood. “I just need another hour to finish this up. I’ll buy you dinner after.”

  “Grrr… fine,” Nelly grumbled, curling into a circle in the grass with her tail serving as a makeshift pillow for herself. “It better not take a single extra minute!”

  Being suddenly thrust into parenting by his own drunk self had been a sobering experience for the oathbreaker, and the demon child’s capacity to manifest tears on demand hadn’t been doing him any more favors than her ludicrous appetite. What little time he spent not resting had been devoted to making sure N’elskaerm was well hidden when asleep, fed on whatever scraps he could afford and clothed in anything suitable he could get his hands on aside from his armor.

  The armor had been causing its own share of issues for Gareth, ripping through the layers underneath it and tightening around his skin with each passing day. If there was anything to be thankful for, it was solely that his appendages no longer complained about the deathly stillness in his veins. The greaves and interconnected plates moved in tandem with his will, swinging the greatsword time and time again.

  The journey back “home” was a chore in itself for Nelly. Compared to the stuffy coat she had curled into, held tucked underneath Gareth’s arm, watching the oh-so-boring sky with its homogenous greyish smudges had felt better. Helping Gareth pile up the wood blocks onto the sled, even if she could only contribute with a handful of pieces among scores and scores, had been better. At least then, she felt somewhat useful, free to help in the way she wanted. Not something to be hidden, or coveted, or blamed.

  Even through the messily folded coat, Nelly’s imagination filled in the gaps, using her ears to discern what her eyes could not. She heard Gareth push the sled up to the cabin where he had first found employ, heard the heated negotiations that followed and clinking of a few coins onto his armor soon after. She imagined what the walls of Leona looked like as they entered the city, using the many murmurs of the guards to construct a vivid lineup of scary-looking men-in-arms. The streets of Leona provided a larger variance in stimulation, filled with a cacophony she had grown used to sleeping amidst since she had arrived.

  Although they had been taking the same route every day back and forth from the forest to their shed, Nelly only recognized their arrival when the coat was slowly lowered onto the bed and unfolded to let her out. Her pupils contracted as she made herself comfortable, adjusting to illumination from the sole oil lamp hanging from the ceiling.

  Hunched over the workbench, Gareth looked down at the pitiful amount gathered between the coins laid before him. His eyes searched the bronzework desperately, fruitlessly hoping for a mistaken silver piece among them.

  “How much did you earn, Gareth?” Nelly asked, skittering towards the table on all fours before hopping onto a nearby stool and standing on her toes to peek over the surface and satisfy her curiosity.

  “Not enough. After clothing and food…” Gareth groaned, taking a step back and letting out a despaired sigh. “We’re still going to be here for another few months at this rate. I… I don’t think our hosts will take to your presence kindly.”

  N’elskaerm frowned, finances were foreign to the child, and so she thought back to the memories where they weren’t an issue.

  “If we found Mama, she could help us! She was very good at earning money!”

  Gareth stared at the demon child’s conclusion with hollow eyes and dropped shoulders, trying to convince himself that her mother wasn’t a mafioso character like his current hosts, or worse, sold her body to keep Nelly fed. Still, he gave merit to her words if their economics had really been good before separation. “Any clue where she might be now?”

  “The last time I saw her was somewhere outside the city… before I was sold to someone here.” Nelly shook her head, but Gareth’s focus was on another part of her recollection entirely.

  “Here? As in, in Leona? Do you know where that was?” The gears in Gareth’s head began to turn, sensing a possible connection if her memory was good enough.

  Much to his dismay, Nelly shook her head once more. “I only saw it on the way out… after that man bought me.”

  “What did you see? Anything recognizable at all… a name or a landmark, I need something to work with,” He urged her, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Please.”

  To say that nights in Leona were eventful would be an understatement. The dreary, despairing, polluted air which prevailed during the day lay overturned come twilight, even though the sky was only a few shades darker than usual.

  Gareth waded through the nightlife with a clear goal in mind, and head held high. It felt unusual to say the least, acting as if he had any hopes for himself within the city forlorn by moderation. Like insects flying out of the woodworks, every corner and club overflowed into the streets with juveniles, and poverty-stricken junkies. The virtuous knight in him yearned to stop and help, to establish order and save wasteful folk long lost to hallucinogenic worlds of their own delusions. Yet, he had a different mission at the moment, illustrated on the paper scrap held between his fingers.

  When Gareth finally found a scant resemblance to N’elskaerm’s hasty scribbles, it wasn’t what he expected. The building looked empty, at least from the outside. It was hard to make out any text on the signage, and the empty windows didn’t help either. A pair of guards dressed in light armor stood before the entrance to the markethouse, carrying a club and a machete respectively.

  Watching Gareth’s massive, armored frame approach them, one of the guards stepped up. “We’re closed for the night.”

  “Right, I got this here order which says otherwise…” Gareth raised the wrinkled paper in his hands, keeping its contents just out of view from the guards as he pretended to read it.

  There was no reason for a pair of guards to be stationed outside in the way they were, if all they were guarding was a closed establishment. A hint of genuine curiosity from the guard on Gareth’s right confirmed it as he lowered the piece of paper, they were more akin to bouncers than night guards.

  WHAM!

  Gareth’s thick gauntlet slammed into the guard’s face, dropping him immediately. The oathbreaker caught an incoming stab from the other guard’s machete right after, comfortably grasping the sharp weapon in his armored palm. The excessive weight he carried showed its merit once more when Gareth shoved the machete-wielder into the building’s entrance, disorienting him with successive rams before the doorframe finally gave way. Leaving the guard knocked out among a mess of splinters, Gareth entered the establishment and forged onward.

  The interior of the structure revealed little more than what he had been able to see from outside, save for a lobby lined with double doors behind the desk at regular intervals. The desk was manned by another pair of guards who rushed at Gareth, ones who seemed uncannily familiar to the first pair.

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  As another knife glanced off his pauldron harmlessly, Gareth realized the odds were stacked in his favor for once. The fallen knight moved with the cadence of an armored cephalopod, shrugging off all attacks to the cursed steel. The commotion soon attracted more guards to the lobby, filling up the confined space with like-faced personalities. Gareth squashed anyone who dared to get within his reach with reinforced blows, and once that wasn’t enough, he unsheathed his greatsword.

  Striking with wide arcs and superior reach against weapons made for close combat, the oathbreaker became a living likeness of a tornado rampaging through the building. The guards found themselves denied any form of approach against the zweihander, but their attempts to overwhelm him seldom abated. Despite his advantages, he was still just one man, and his adversaries were many, far too many, with their facsimile visages and overwhelming duplicity.

  Out of the corner of what vision his helm allowed for, Gareth saw one of the clones slip through a set of double doors leading to the back. Readjusting his grip to take his surroundings into account, he rushed towards a parallel set of doors with a wide swing to clear the way, busting through them with a kick.

  On the other side, a rapidly-emptying slave auction house was met with reinvigorated wrath from Gareth. Closest to him were an array of audacious patrons in the process of making a hasty escape, and in the back, a clique of captives, varying in age and race, were being dragged behind the stage by cuffs and chains. Ignoring the patrons, Gareth charged straight towards the stage with a valiant shout. “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

  Non-compliance was the least of Gareth’s issues at the moment, feeling a few clones grab onto his armor and drag him back in unison. Individually, his weight class alone was enough to render their efforts to move him insignificant. However, the constricted steel lacked the flexibility to deal with being piled on.

  They were like locusts besieging a moving tank, easily eliminated yet replaced by more of the same. He could feel them stabbing haphazardly along the plate mail with knives and machetes, searching for a chink in his armor to slip their blades through. The cursed carapace gave them no such gap, however, and despite their collective efforts being able to knock him down, the oathbreaker refused to let himself be subdued. The situation was reminiscent of when Leona’s castle guards had dragged him away to their dungeons, save for one thing – this time, he had something to fight for.

  The suffering of innocent people was on the line, and it drove Gareth like nothing else could. In the midst of that chaotic brawl, he grappled and smashed, kicked and slashed, each heavy motion either contributing to freeing himself from the platoon of expendable bodies around him or making headway to the backstage.

  Reeking exsanguination from the cascade of corpses along the theatre hall’s downward stairs soon replaced the aristocratic air of the auction house, rising from the clones Gareth had culled and choking the room in its grasp. The smell disoriented him more than anything else had that night, a stark reminder of that regretful day once again. He swung that deadly hunk of metal he called a sword around himself with complete abandon, slicing through flesh, bone, wood and cloth all the same. His ears welled up with cries of the injured, the creaking of sundered, splintered wood and distant hints of a conversation over panicked shouts.

  The scant survivorship of anyone who dared to stay within the reach of his greatsword eventually cleaved Gareth’s bloodstained path past the stage curtains. Breaking through its billowing layers to the other side revealed a large backdoor past the scattered remains of portable imprisonment in the form of terribly scratched marble tiling.

  Bursting through the backdoor led out onto the streets of Leona, notably emptier than he was used to on that side. Gareth looked to either side, finding a dead end to his right and the main road to his left. No, he suspected this was more akin to a larger alley, meant for mercantile caravans to be parked behind the auction house.

  The knight’s suspicions were confirmed by the beating of hooves against dirt, brick and tiles, accompanied by the arrival of a covered cart led by a pair of horses, and a face he had grown to despise at the helm.

  “You’ve cost us a lot of good business today, sicko!” The cart-driver yelled, rallying about a dozen clones both from within the caravan and the building to cut Gareth off from the main road. Given the time to prepare themselves, they had emerged with a variety of weapons ranging from maces and swords to crossbows and spears this time, all poised to eliminate the oathbreaker.

  Surrounded by clones like an injured rhinoceros being circled by a pack of hungry hyenas, Gareth took a moment of respite. Fleeting sprouts of a plan to steal the carriage and use it to escape with the prisoners burrowed out from the depths of his laboured mind, but his first instinct was to dismiss them.

  “Absurd… I’m not a hero like that. If I were, I wouldn’t stand the stench of this city for a single breath. Rotten to the core, just like me…”

  Far away, yet close enough within his periphery that he could tell them apart from Leona’s dreary streets, the oathbreaker noticed that some other people had gathered near the main road. There was no doubt that they were spectators, eagerly basking in the imminence of slaughter.

  “Out of gas, huh. Where’s that fire from before?” The carriage driver spat out in response to Gareth’s defensive stance and apparent hesitation. His provocation encouraged more quips from his other selves, who were all too eager to try and get under the dark knight’s skin.

  “Let’s tie ‘im up, boys!”

  “We’ll tether him to the back and drive him around the city!”

  “Bet that’ll scrape the grime off his blasted armor, HAHA!”

  “Oh, oh! We can–”

  Gareth tightened his grip around the greatsword, making a strange observation within the camaraderie all around him. The threat of being dragged through the streets hadn’t particularly phased him, and neither did the various other attempts to scare him.

  “Whatever happens to me… doesn’t matter. I just need to free the captives. Nelly… she’ll be fine without me if their captives escape and reach her.”

  Gareth made his decision in the spur of the moment, charging towards the carriage as clones rushed to strike him down. The two horses in the lead swerved to either direction with loud neighs, unfortunately the targets of his first swing. The piercing cries borne from their front legs being sliced made way for his next objective, the driver.

  He could already feel bolts glancing off his armor, maces trying to cave in his joints and numerous arms and legs attempting to trip, pull and down him as he brought his sword upon the driver. It didn’t hit, but it was enough to move the man, which for Gareth was enough. Using one of the writhing horses as a stepping stool after a wide cleave to make room for himself, he clambered onto the carriage’s front. For just a moment, he was alone atop the carriage, and that was all he needed to rip the door to the back open, revealing a menagerie of scared, shackled captives meant for sale.

  “RUN! Find the–” Gareth shouted to them, before being interrupted by a mace smashing his armored face against the woodwork. Once more, found himself in an awkward position between his objectives. The carriage wasn’t shaped for a greatsword to be swung from, and his enemies only found more footing with each passing moment. “GET OUT OF HERE!” He yelled a final message before descending into the mess below.

  What followed was an unabashedly filthy, adrenaline-fueled brawl. When one grabbed his arm, they were slammed into the nearest clone, and those who went for his legs were stomped upon. Fists were just as valid a weapon among the others, and Gareth’s were coated in cursed steel. He found no room to move without striking someone or the other, refusing to go down even after a growing account of punctures, gashes and lacerations on himself. Where the clones used duplicity, all he had was rage that left him numb to the pain and kept his muscles moving where they should have failed.

  “Rip and TEAR until–!”

  Anger gave way to thoughts unbecoming of himself. His body moved to the whims of violence, and a different kind of pain flared within him as a spear found its way under his armor and dug into his shoulder. It began as a sharp shock in the back of his head, before shooting to the muscles he should’ve lost from the precise stab. Much to his hazy astonishment, the arm which should’ve been dead weight moved on its own, carried by his armor.

  It continued until the last of the clones lay under him, the man’s head shaped into the pasty reminiscence of a pancake. All around him lay a mass of mangled viscera and appendages, although his blurry eyes made it all out as a reddish-brown mess. Gareth’s legs shivered as he got up, hobbling his way to the carriage. If all had gone well, he expected to see the captives either still there or long gone and escaped. What the oathbreaker found was the former, albeit with a cruel twist of fate.

  Each of the captives had their throats slit or lethal stabs lining their torsos, leaving only a single pair of unlocked cuffs next to an open backdoor. Gareth staggered forward, stepping over the chained corpses to see one remaining clone and the slave he had chosen to take captive.

  “If I can’t sell em, might as well off em, ey?” The clone spoke through grit teeth, keeping his distance from the dark knight and threatening the woman in his grip with a dagger.

  Gareth simply stood there, staring at what was now the outcome of a poorly thought out and shoddily executed plan that had only ended in people dying in hordes more than they should have. Looking into the woman’s scared eyes, he remained frozen in place. He wouldn’t be able to close the gap fast enough even if he tried.

  “You fucking terrorist!” The clone spat out in desperation, backing away from Gareth. “One wrong breath from you, and I’ll slice this–!”

  BANG!

  A single shot rang out, simultaneously accompanied by the criminal’s brains being splattered across the street and the sidewalk by a lead projectile. His captive screamed and covered her ears, but Gareth’s attention was immediately stolen by its source, one that he could easily recognize even in the midst of the night.

  Roman slowly lowered the flintlock in his hands, tucking it into his coat pocket with an annoyed expression as he emerged from the shadows. Gareth only had the wherewithal in his bones to vaguely hear a single sentence from the man before keeling over to one side, letting injuries and long overdue exhaustion abscond with his consciousness in a moment of shock.

  “You really are a troublesome one to harbor.”

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