"You speak true, friend," Axebourne returned. "Ess, cut off their southern retreat. Agrathor, take the five. Scythia will cover the northward road."
"And me, sir?" Pierce asked. A dart flew right at his face and he deflected it with his blade.
"Come with me, we'll take the seven."
Pierce nodded and the group broke up. Ess sent her orbs every which way, providing destructive cover fire for her comrades. Pierce watched one of the orbs crash through the trunk of a tree, splitting it at the point of impact. It swung down from above, fibers holding until the treetop impacted the ground. Someone in the underbrush screamed.
"One down!" Ess called.
The shadows flared blue as Agrathor released electric rage on the other side of the road. The bandits ahead of Axebourne and Pierce ceased firing their darts and stepped out of hiding. Two dropped down from branches above.
They were dressed well for bandits, in clean leathers and holding polished swords and axes. This must have been a lucrative stretch of road for them. Not today.
Axebourne signaled that he would take the left flank - there were four men that way. This left three for Pierce. Axebourne reached his prey first. One of them tried to dodge around a thick tree to get behind Axebourne, but the big man planted a vicious standing kick in the tree trunk that ripped fiber from fiber, almost as clean as if it had been chopped with the world's sharpest axe. Thousands of pounds of living wood slammed into the bandit's body and the tree fell down on top of him.
"Two!" Axebourne bellowed. He grinned at the next three. They fell back several paces, widening their formation.
"You guys should probably leave!" Pierce called to the three bandits in front of him.
One stepped forward instead and swung a single-edged claymore at him. Far too slow. Pierce sidestepped and brought his blue blade up swiftly, severing the man's hands at his wrists. His heavy sword clattered to the ground and he cried out in shock, falling to the ground and clutching at his wrist stumps.
"Pierce got three," Ess called from somewhere above. One of her orbs shot between tree branches and blew through the bandit's chest, ending his misery.
The other two approached Pierce cautiously. One of them was very heavyset, and almost as tall as Pierce.
"Four!" came Agrathor's rasping voice.
"Five!" boomed Axebourne from nearby.
The heavy bandit brought his battle axe down in a crushing blow. An ordinary man could not have parried it, but Pierce's training and natural gift saw him through - the bone melter sliced through the axe's very blade, bisecting it, and Pierce fired his blast gauntlet with his off-hand, blowing apart the man's arm below the elbow. He fell to the muddy ground, irrationally trying to collect the pieces of his ruined limb and screaming. His fervor quickly faded as shock took him and he began to bleed out.
Pierce watched the next man carefully, dark eyeslit unreadable. Then his final bandit turned and fled, and Pierce gave chase. The man was fast.
"Nine!" Axebourne growled from behind him. Somehow Pierce had missed the last few counts.
The running man hit the hard-packed road and abandoned his sword, fleeing south in panic. Another bandit from Agrathor's side joined him, but they didn't even give each other a glance.
Pierce could run all day, but blind panic lent the bandits speed. He wasn't sure he'd catch them without using the blast gauntlet for a little boost. He didn't need to worry.
Ess lowered herself closer to the ground in front of the fleeing bandits, her seven liquid orbs floating around her in strange patterns. Her robe began to billow around her at the behest of some unseen force that also stirred the dust of the road. She brought her hands up, letting her drooping sleeves fall away, and Pierce couldn't help but notice how slender and enticingly feminine they were. She had painted the nails white, in strong contrast to her jet-black skin.
His masculine stupor was dispelled when she stretched her hands out to either side, palms up, and violently closed them into fists. The last two bandits screamed in a duet of pain, but the screams were cut short as fountains of blood and bone erupted from the place where they'd been. The sound was like that of a butcher gutting every hog in the shop simultaneously - a mixture of cutting, ripping, and crushing all at once. Pierce had never heard anything like it, and immediately his image of Ess shifted into a more multifaceted thing than it had previously been.
She was no dainty doll.
The moment stretched long, and the gore of the bandits seemed to hang in the air before falling in a splattering rain to the dry dirt. Somewhere, squirrels and rodents fled, rustling leaves and twigs.
The rest of Gorgonbane met back at the road. Pierce was frozen in awe of Ess. Agrathor came up behind and slapped his shoulder, grinning.
"Twelve," he grated.
Though rendered unconscious, the raptorions were unharmed. Nevertheless, Gorgonbane were forced to make camp for the night while they waited for the sedatives to wear off. No one else had been hurt. They were all seated around a cookfire built at the roadside, roasting meat from a freshly hunted wild boar on long, pointy sticks.
"Why would they even try?" Pierce asked. He'd always considered himself a decent person, but even if he had been some kind of criminal or ruffian, and even if he somehow hadn't known who Gorgonbane were, there was no way he would have attacked such an obviously well-armed group.
"Some people think only with their eyes, son," Axebourne said, his big lips were pulled to one side in a contemplative smirk. "Some with their bellies."
"Some with their pants," added Scythia.
"Yes," Axebourne agreed. "Not everyone is as present in life's moments as you are. Surely you must have noticed this before?"
Pierce nodded noncommittally. "Well, I suppose," he said. "I guess it still just doesn't make sense to me."
"Probably won't ever," said Agrathor. "Who can
