I had expected the Burghsmen to erupt at some point. I waited, only yards from the edge of the crude fortress, listening for the warriors to erupt with battle cries and roars. Instead, there was nothing that human ears could hear.

The fort was barely that. It was a loose collection of ruins with rough palisades erected. Instead of gates, there were simply gaps in the palisades. In the center of the cluster of partially repaired old buildings was one larger structure, like a great hall. This place had not really been constructed with the expectation of withstanding protracted defenses.

My HEARING brought the sounds of the camp to me: disjointed pieces of conversation, the cracks of a fire. I could smell meat cooking. The stink of human waste and urine mingled in the air with scents of stale ale.

Then there was the sickening tink, the sharp rasp of steel cutting meat and tapping off bone. The sound came again, too quiet to detect without HEARING, accompanied by a vile gurgling, bubbling sound. The warriors of Jaxwulf were at work.

The sound came twice more before shouts and cries started to erupt.

“Murder!”

“L-larry? Someone’s fucking killed Larry!”

“We’re attacked! To arms!”

Then the Burghsmen roared. Even I was startled by the volume of their battle cries and the immediacy of their position. They were well within the camp and all over it. The responding shouts were just as furious but somehow less chilling. The air was alive with the sounds of steel on steel, and more sickening, liquid sounds of death.

I sprinted in through a gap in the palisade. It was undefended, the thugs all moving towards the sounds of their attackers.

A band of five men, armed with swords and clubs, were rushing from the great hall when they saw me. My momentum carried me to them. I will never know if they really planned to fight me, or if they would have tried in their right minds. They responded from instinct, raising weapons. But they did it with pupils contracted by terror. They faced a Griidlord. I faced the simplest of mortals.

The story the man at the village had told me was fresh and active in my mind as I met the gang of men. I could not stop thinking of his face, the sadness and pain that lived there when he described the ruffians dragging the village woman away. It fueled me and made what came next much easier than I had expected.

I didn’t even reach for POWER.

The first man swung his sword, and my CUT passed through it, turning the steel to glowing slag. He didn’t have time to scream as the molten metal poured over his hands, sizzling and pushing the stink of burning meat and fat into the air. My blade continued, having destroyed his, through his body, cleaving him neatly in a horizontal line, separating his body into a top half and a bottom half that would have no more to do with each other.

A club came at me, and I caught it, the force of my anger and emotions propelling me. The timber of the club crunched and splintered under the force of my grip, and I punched the wielder with my sword hand. The bearded face became a ruined crater, like a crushed insect. Blood and fluid gushed from every opening as the fresh corpse tumbled away from me.

I roared as I swept my sword in a huge, weeping horizontal arc. The light of CUT blazed like the fires of an avenging hell, bathing the terrified faces of the remaining three men in faint red light. My sword passed through all of them in that one sweep. Each time it struck a fresh body, I felt the slightest tug of resistance, heard the faintest thunk as the burning pillar of death ripped through their fragile bodies. I paused at the end of my swing, facing three immobile corpses, frozen in the last stances they would ever hold. Then the corpses slid apart. The gore was monumentally horrible, but I barely processed it. I moved on, leaving a pile of torsos and pools of blood on the ground behind me.

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So this was the power I had been promised. I hadn’t appreciated before what it was that I wielded. I had only fought fiends and Hordesmen since I gained the suit, creatures and beings that exceeded the powers of ordinary men. I had been impressed with my ability to defeat such nightmares, but none of it had come easily. Here, moving through clutches of men like a scythe through grass, I came to understand my powers better.

I was skilled with a sword, well-trained, and more than a match for any one of these men without the suit. But with the suit, I was an avenging force of nature, sweeping toward the great hall and grinding men to meat and paste.

The roars and shrieks of battle assaulted my ears as I CUT and BEAMED man after man. I couldn’t see what was happening with the others, but from the sounds, I knew the Burghsmen were wreaking their own terrible justice on the brigands who called themselves freedom fighters.

As I reached the door of the great hall, a man burst out. He was a tremendously large fellow and, unlike the others, was well-equipped, bearing a steel breastplate and a staggeringly large longsword. His eyes bulged as he saw a Griidlord tearing toward him. To his credit, he leveled his sword at me. I smashed it aside with the back of my armored left hand and drove the tip of my sword through his breastplate as though it were paper. My visor flared with POWER as I lifted the man impaled on my sword with one arm. His eyes bugged and bulged, blood gurgling through the gaps in his teeth.

I had an odd moment of calm as I looked into his face. Blood ran in a froth from his mouth, brighter and more scarlet than I expected. It foamed over his beard, and instead of a voice, the man only had a gurgling rasp. I realized, with some guilt, that despite my trepidation about killing my fellow man, I was, in fact, reveling in this. Was this how the big kid in the yard felt as he threw his weight around among smaller children? Was this the lust of the fox among the hens? Whatever it was, right then, I exalted in my power. How far I had come from being a mortal man.

The guilt would come later, I was sure.

I flicked my arm and tossed the dying man from my sword. He crashed into a ruined stone wall, writhing and twisting as he clutched at the geyser of blood erupting from the hole in his breastplate.

I turned back to the door he had exited. In the moment I had spent ending that man’s life, someone had barred it. It was a huge, heavy door. They might have put poor effort into constructing their camp, but someone here had gone to the effort of making this structure defensible. Defensible to men, not gods.

My visor flared as POWER burst through me. My booted heel smashed into the door, bowing its shape, sending the slab of timber crashing into the innards of the house like a projectile. Men shrieked in pain, bones crunched horribly as the ruined door crushed a man against the far wall.

I was inside then, lost in a dizzying dance of power and ease. My blade CUT through sword and arm, shield and skull. I made an artwork of the walls and ceilings. Dramatic patterns of blood painted the surfaces, bits of flesh and bone stuck to the canvas. The floor grew slick.

In the blur, I found two men remaining where an instant before there had been a dozen. I hacked down on the first, not thinking about the exhilaration I felt at watching my sword shred mail and flesh and bone. Then I spun, my sword licking out almost carelessly to end the life of the last man in the structure.

I was almost confused by the clang of steel on steel, by the feeling of my sword striking steel and being deflected away. I was surprised to feel the recoil of the impact run through my arm and up to my elbow.

My surprise nearly killed me. I barely brought my sword back up in time to parry the easy flick of the offending sword. What was happening?

I bounded back and looked for the first time at the remaining man.

A dark, knee-length jacket hung from the man’s shoulders. He held a sword not of normal steel but one that pulsed with the light of a power weapon—something rare, dangerous, and alien-looking. The man stood at his ease, despite facing the terrible danger of the force of nature I had become. He was not even slightly fazed by the ground meat his compatriots had been turned into.

I felt my confidence waning then, felt the coldness of reality hit me like a punch in the gut.

The man didn’t charge; he just stood in a relaxed fencer’s stance, the power rapier pointed at me in a relaxed but distinctly lethal hand.

Danefer said, “Tiberius, I was hoping to speak with you.”