JURGO

“No!”! Jurgo shouted, jumping up and down on the rooftop. “No you idiots, you were supposed to win!”

Jurgo had watched the battles from his perch atop the Golderson Building. It was the tallest building in the city, closest to being an actual skyscraper. This late at night it was entirely empty, but had served as a good place for Jurgo to camp out while he watched his plan unfold. Or as it turned out a good place for Jurgo to watch his plan fall apart. Where had he gone wrong? He'd sent each of his grandfather's crewmen after a target he thought they'd have some trouble with. The idea was they'd get wounded in the fight, come back wounded from killing the knights, and Jurgo could ambush them with his newly upgraded abilities.

It was a good plan. A great plan. He was sure Jalgoz would have been proud of him. But then they all went and lost! To a bunch of no-name knights who'd barely ever even been in a battle before! What kind of legendary pirate crew were they?

He was so bust fuming he didn't noticed the rooftop doors open behind him.

“There you are!” A disgustingly familiar voice said. “It took me a while to find you. I figured you'd be someplace high up, but all that hardware you're wearing really changed the sound of your heartbeat. Is it even the same heart anymore, or did me and Verro fuck that up too?”

Jurgo turned with a snarl to glare at Fann.

“It's just me this time,” Fann said. “J'vann went to help the others. We split up a while ago so I'm not sure what's happening, but...how's that evil plan coming along?”

“Shut up!” Jurgo snarled, leveling his gun arm and firing. Fann nimbly dodged out of the way. What fired wasn't a laser but a lozenge of the slime from Jurgo's slug regalia. It pierced into the wall and exploded into a ball of crystals.

“Oooh you got a new trick!” Fann said. “But I've had weeks to think about our last fight, and you know what? I still think I can take you.”

“Take me?” Jurgo laughed, slime-skating around the rooftop firing blasts from his arm gun. “Last time we went one on one you couldn't even hurt me!”

“Yeah but that was before I worked out this move,” Fann grinned, dancing around the blasts and swinging his sword at Jurgo. He hit the bandit's belly, the slime hardening into a plate of crystal, but instead of bouncing off his sword stayed pressed against it. With a flick of his wrist Fann knocked the crystal plate out of the way then fast as lighting brought his sword out and back, slamming into Jurgo's side. Jurgo grunted pain.

“You cut me!” He shrieked, his eyes wide. “You....huh?”

He patted his uncut side. Uncut but not undamaged, ugly bruises growing where he'd been struck.

“I hit you with the flat of the blade,” Fann said. “They tell me I can't kill you. But if I don't bother to hum and vibrate my blade it doesn't resonate with the crystal and bounce off, and Verro showed me it takes a second for the slime armor to cover again after a crystal falls off. All I have to do is what he did, hit you twice in the same spot really fast.”

“You think you can take me alive?” Jurgo yelled. “You can't! And you're too scared of my grandfather to try anything else!”

“True enough,” Fann said. “I'll say it out loud even, I am scared of your grandfather. The stories about him only need to be half—no, one quarter true for him to be somebody I really don't want to fight. But you, Jurgo? You're tough, and I'll give you points for guts, but once I figured out how to get past that armor you're not much of a threat.”

Jurgo charged with an inarticulate roar but Fann sidestepped him again, performing his double-tap trick to land a few more blows on his chest and still human arm. Jurgo howled in pain, clutching his spreading bruises.

“See I've got a feeling you're not used to getting hit a lot,” Fann said. “I'm not judging you I'm pretty much the same way. With me it's dodging, with you it's that crystal slime you got all over you, but both of us when we fight focus on avoiding hits rather than learning to take the pain. Of course that means when we fight someone who can see through our trick, all of a sudden we're at a disadvantage....”

“You think I'm at a disadvantage?” Jurgo laughed, leveling his gun, but Fann was already moving. He darted around the blast and delivered three blows in rapid succession to the side of Jurgo's head. The bandit's world swam, he lost all equilibrium and collapsed to the ground.

“Yes,” Fann said, sitting down on the raised edge of the rooftop. “I really do.”

Jurgo tried to stand but everything was moving around on him, like the rooftop was adrift in the middle of a lake. He made it to his feet but he was unsteady, weaving back and forth.

“Jurgo!” A new voice, also familiar. “Stop it. Right now.”

Jurgo turned to glare at Ms. Fadden. She wasn't standing anywhere near the door, just on the corner of the rooftop, her Widow's Regalia active. Jurgo reasoned she must have climbed up the side of the building on those damn spider legs. What the hell she actually planned to do was different question.

“Did you just try and give me an order,” he snarled at her, “bitch?”

“Don't try it Jurgo you're not your grandfather,” Ms. Fadden said. She sounded bored. “I'll admit I didn't think they could take the last of Balthazar Nodd's crew either, but they did. They're too tough for you, Jurgo. And none of us even really want to catch you, we just can't have you running around causing any more trouble.”

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“She's right,” Fann srugged. “Fighting you is a whole lot of risk for no reward.”

“So here's the deal,” Ms. Fadden said. “Why don't you just leave? Leave the planet, stop being my problem for seven months. At which point I will not care about you at all. Go build a pirate crew, or start another group of bandits, or find a university somewhere get your degree and become an accountant it's all the same to me. Just stop putting everyone on my planet at risk because of this stupid crap.”

“And what if I don't think you can take me?” He snarled, pointing the barrel of his arm gun at Ms. Fadden.

“Then you're an even bigger idiot than everyone thought,” Ms. Fadden said, pulling a tiny remote from her pocket. “Or did you actually forget who gave you those prosthetics?”

She pressed the button and suddenly his mechanical arm wouldn't move anymore. It fell, dead weight hanging at his side, his eyes widening in shock. “Jalgoz never would have fallen for that one. He'd have had someone check everything we gave him for booby traps the second he got out of custody. But you're not Jalgoz, any more than you're your grandfather.”

His gun arm now useless Jurgo stared wildly between the government agent and the grinning knight. Mocking him. They were mocking him! But...they might have a point. Jalgoz wouldn't have fallen for that one. And he knew he wasn't Jalgoz, or their grandfather, but he'd always thought he was, well, one of them. One of the strong ones. Had he been fooling himself this whole time? Had he really gone his whole life on their coattails? The thought filled him with a boiling rage. Rage that went beyond reason, beyond fear, beyond self preservation. In a very real way, Jurgo had just lost everything.

He charged.

Neither of his opponents was ready for it, and he caught the knight around the chest with his human arm dragging them together over the side of the roof.

FANN

Fann heard Ms. Fadden scream “NO!” as the two of them went over the cliff, and he knew for a certainty she was far more worried about the bandit. He couldn't really blame her. Fann didn't know if Jurgo had a plan to survive the fall or if he just didn't care anymore, but he was certain that even if the bandit had some kind of out it would not include Fann, inheritor of the Regalia of the Bat.

Not that he could think of anything to do about it. He struggled in Jurgo's grip, maybe if he was free he could do his air-stepping trick to get down safely, but the slimy grasp was surprisingly firm he couldn't wriggle out of it. And the ground was getting disturbingly close...

The problem solved itself when Fann felt a sudden jerk, and the bandit let go of him. The jerking motion made Fann feel like he was going to throw up but he was free, his momentum mostly arrested, and not too far from the ground. A few careful air hops to bring him down and he was standing safely on the sidewalk below. He mused that “the sidewalk below” was one of those inevitable destinations. If you are above the sidewalk you will, at some point, wind up “on the sidewalk below.” The only question is what condition you will be in when you get there. Fann, luckily, appeared to be in one piece.

Jurgo, meanwhile, was screaming. And he had not yet arrived on the sidewalk below.

This was because he was bouncing wildly on a lengthy tether of spider's web attached to a cocoon that had been formed around him. He screamed and flailed, but the thread seemed very carefully placed to avoid any possibility of him slamming into a wall and getting killed. He nodded appreciatively as Ms. Fadden descended the building on her spider legs.

“Nice work,” he said.

“I almost had a heart attack!” she snapped at him. “You should have told us you knew where he was and let me handle it in the first place!”

“Alright alright,” Fann said, rising his hands in surrender. “That's fair. I was just a little cheesed about how badly he knocked me around in our first fight. Won't happen again.”

“Of course it won't!” Ms. Fann hissed. “You and the other knights are leaving tomorrow! By which point I will be on a cocktail of extremely potent tranquilizers. Besides, we had a tracker in him anyway!”

Jurgo's bouncing momentum came to a stop with his head hanging about three feet over the concrete, putting a dent in Fann's theory about the inevitability of the sidewalk below. He was still breathing, although somewhere in all the bouncing around he'd passed out.

“Is that Jurgo?” Rimni said excitedly. “I never actually saw him.” The Rat Knight had arrived with Sasha, and from what Fann could see pretty much everyone else...except for Tyram and Andry. But J'vann, Verro, Aurina, Sasha, and of course Rimni were all walking up to the dangling bandit as a group. Rimni ran to the side of the cocooned Jurgo. “Does he look like his grandfather? I don't picture the strongest pirate ever looking so lame.”

“No,” Ms. Fadden said. “He doesn't.”

“Where did you guys come from?” Fann laughed.

“We met up while we sought to provide each other assistance,” J'vann said. “But we had all already won our battles.”

“Not sure what happened to Tyram and Andry though,” Sasha said.

“Ah they're fine,” Verro said. “Whatever Tyram's going through they're both tough.”

“Still,” Aurina said. “Maybe we should go looking for them. They could be having trouble...”

“No,” a new voice rasped from the end of the street. “They're fine.”

The group standing by the unconscious bandit turned to see a lanky figure stomping up, long coat and beard both soaked with blood gushing from a huge hole in his chest. It was a wonder the man was still alive, let alone that he was walking, even if that walk as a shambling limp. He looked like he could collapse into a pile of meat at any second. He gripped one of his double-barreled Regalia guns in a bloody hand.

“If you mean those other two knights they're fine and dandy,” Birger chuckled, blood spattering as he laughed. “I mean they did for me well enough, you can tell just by lookin'.”

“Who's that?” Rimni demanded.

“Birger,” Ms. Fadden said. “Balthazar Nodd's first mate. He's never looked better. Are you here to fight?”

“Fight?” Birger shook his head. “No. No not here to fight. That's all over now. We're all dead, aren't we? And the knights barely got a scratch.”

“Yes,” Ms. Fadden said.

“Yeah,” Birger said. “Yeah. Jurgo and his plans screwed us all but good. Little shit.”

Birger raised his gun and blew Jurgo's head open like a melon, bits of blood and brain and metal from his prosthetics scattering everywhere.

Birger didn't bother to listen to what they all shouted, he just finally let himself collapse and roll behind and air car. With herculean effort he grabbed the bumper and pulled his head and shoulders up off the pavement. He had, he reminded himself, one more thing to do. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a hand communicator, pressing the button on the side. Only one button. The communicator only called one place.

“Birger?” came the voice of his captain over the speaker. A great man. The greatest man who ever lived. Betrayed by the weakness of lesser men who happened to be his own blood. It would be better this way. “Birger what's going on? Report?”

“We're dead captain,” Birger said. “We're all dead.”

“What about Jurgo? Is my grandson alive?”

“I just saw his corpse myself,” Birger said. “They got us captain. I'm sorry.”

He turned off the communicator. He really was sorry. But it had to be done, and the tragedy of it all overwhelmed him just before the darkness did, and his body slumped lifeless to the street.