He blocked the blow meant to cripple him with the haft of his hammer and brought the other one down on the witch’s skull. A stunned silence fell over the crowd, both Nocturnean and dusk-wraith, as Vulkan pulled his weapon from the gory smear he had left behind.
He spat on the corpse then glared at the female witch.
“Not wraiths at all, just flesh and blood.”
The witch smiled, her interest and her ardour suddenly piqued. “Mon’keigh…”
She licked her lips then blended back into the shadows. Before Vulkan could come after her, the gate to the town of Hesiod exploded in a storm of splinters and fire.
Vulkan was engulfed, reduced to a dark and hazy silhouette as the fire rolled over him. Shielding his eyes, he knew he would not die and stepped from the conflagration unharmed. That alone gave the dusk-wraiths aboard the skiff pause as it confronted him through the ragged gap in the wall.
Warriors, the ones in night-black armour, spilled around the edges of the skiff, eagerly brandishing hooks and blades. Vulkan snapped a dusk-wraith in half as it swung at him then crushed another with a blow from his fist.
Behind him, he heard his kinsmen attack as the people of Hesiod fought back against the slavers that had plagued them for centuries.
Vaulting over a horde of warriors, their blades cutting harmlessly through air, Vulkan landed in front of the skiff. Fingers like iron bolts dug into the lamellar nose of the machine as the Nocturnean turned it over. Screeching slavers fell from the tipped vessel before Vulkan tossed it aside like an unwanted spear. The battered skiff rolled over the ground before erupting in a ball of fiery shrapnel.
Two more came in its wake, the first harbouring a cohort of warriors. At the orders of its driver, the skiff accelerated to ramming speed intending to impale Vulkan on the spiked prow. Timing his jump to perfection, he leapt onto the floating barge at full pelt and raced up the vehicle’s plated snout like it was the shallow flank of a mountain crag.
The warriors came at him, spitting hell-shards from their rifles or lunging with jagged blades. Vulkan smashed their attacks aside and was amongst them, hewing with his hammers.
Hatred fuelled his every swing, together with a determination that the cycle of torture and fear would end here at this very dawn. He tore loose the command throne of the skiff’s driver, the warriors a broken mess behind him, and threw it at the third vehicle.
An energy blossom flashed as the improvised missile struck a protective field surrounding the last skiff, but Vulkan hadn’t slowed and was charging through it. Skin burning as he passed through the energy shield, he landed on the deck of the vehicle and faced off against a cadre of warriors. They looked brawnier than the others and toted bladed glaives that crackled with unnatural power. Each wore a face-plate as white as alabaster in stark contrast to the visceral red of their ornate armour. The ghosts glared at the interloper imperiously. Behind them, the slaver-lord looked through the jagged eye-slits of a horned helm. A rasped utterance through the fanged mouth grille unleashed his warriors.
One of the ghosts advanced silently and swung his glaive, but Vulkan dipped from the blow that left a blazing trail in the air behind it. A second glaive jabbed at him and this time Vulkan swatted it down into the skiff’s deck plating, but was left with a smoking haft in his hand. Another blow reduced his other hammer to ash as he was forced to parry again.
Rising from his seat, the slaver-lord snarled his displeasure at the Nocturnean’s continued existence.
With their enemy disarmed, the ghosts’ arrogance overflowed and they prepared to finish him.
Vulkan growled with contempt. “I need no weapons to kill the likes of you.”
In a devastating display of speed and brutality, he took the bodyguards apart. Impaled and beheaded by their very own blades, Vulkan threw their shattered remains over the side of the skiff and into the melee below.
Levelling a finger at the slaver-lord, he promised, “This terror ends with your life.”
The dusk-wraith pulled a glittering sword from the scabbard nestled next to his throne. A dark mist coiled from the blade and pricked at Vulkan’s nose. A hollow, hacking sound escaped from the slaver-lord’s lips. It resonated through the mouth of his monstrous fright mask. It was laughter.
Vulkan then noticed a needle-like gauntlet on the dusk-wraith’s other hand. He pointed it at the Nocturnean in mocking symmetry of the threat he’d just received.
“Paaaiin…” he hissed.
Even with superhuman speed, Vulkan couldn’t reach the slaver-lord before he unleashed the gauntlet weapon.
“Son!”
N’bel’s voice rang out above the clash around him. Instinct told Vulkan to reach out with his open hand. A subtle change in the breeze suggested something moving through it. His senses alive to everything, Vulkan’s fingers closed around the worn haft of a smiting hammer and plucked it blindly from the air. It left his grip a split second later, spinning towards the slaver-lord then splitting his ugly mask before the thought had even entered his mind that he was doomed. His face cloven in two, the slaver-lord dropped his sword and toppled off the end of the skiff.
Vaulting down to the square, Vulkan set about the other dusk-wraiths without slowing. He was of the killing mind, a warrior spirit flaring within that both terrified and excited him. Seizing a passing dusk-wraith he crushed its head to paste within its helm. Another he broke apart upon his knee. A third, fourth, fifth… Vulkan battered them with his bare fists as all the terrors the slavers had committed against Nocturne over the centuries were repaid in violent and bloody retribution.
The battle was over swiftly.
Unprepared for such stern resistance, the remnants of the dusk-wraith raiding party withdrew before they were utterly destroyed. Frenzied with battle-lust, only the witches lingered. There was one amongst them who had a last knife to stab and twist before she was done.
She was at the opposite end of the square, dancing around the spears and swords of the Nocturneans, leaving decapitated bodies with every turn and pirouette. Vulkan’s eyes became hate-filled slits when he found the laughing witch.
That anger turned into panic when he saw who rushed next into her killing arc.
“Father!”
Vulkan was much more than human. He possessed strength, speed and intelligence greater than any man, it was how he knew he was different to his kith and kin, but even he could not reach N’bel before those murderous knives.
Cursing his earlier wrathful abandon for losing the hammer with which he’d killed the slaver-lord, Vulkan clenched his empty fists. The only man he had known as father was about to be butchered while he looked on. Every step across the blood-soaked square felt like ten leagues as the witch’s blade circled and flashed… carving… hypnotising… deadly.
Tears of fire blurred the Nocturnean’s sight, the scene unfolding before him framed by a crimson haze. It would be forever scarred into his memory.
N’bel lifted his spear…
…the witch would cut him open and spill his guts…
Her eyes flashed and her gaze met Vulkan’s across the carnage. Even in the act of murder she exuded arrogance. He would remember those eyes, dagger-thin and filled with a sickening ennui. They would haunt him, though not in the way he thought…
N’bel was hopelessly outmatched. His spear thrust was already travelling wide even as the shimmering falchions sought out his vital organs… but the blows never fell. With a roar, Breughar threw himself in harm’s way. To the metal-shaper’s immense credit, he parried one of the blades and it carved a heavy wound along his forearm that drew a scream from the burly tribesman. With the second blade his fortune faded and it sank deep into his belly, ripping free with a terrible sluurch of rent skin. Breughar’s innards slopped onto the ground in a steaming pile of offal. For a moment he stood transfixed by the realisation of his own death, then he fell and was still. Blood pooled beneath the body, expanding in a ruddy mire that touched N’bel’s feet. Dazed and prone from when the metal-shaper had thrown him aside, he could barely lift his arms to defend himself.