image [https://i.imgur.com/e6TojKA.jpeg]image [https://i.imgur.com/5JLBCVN.jpeg]image [https://imgur.com/5JLBCVN]
image [https://i.imgur.com/4v7qMqQ.jpeg]
image [https://i.imgur.com/re5hVIv.jpeg]
image [https://i.imgur.com/plwdC15.jpeg]
image [https://i.imgur.com/IixaBa9.jpeg]image [https://i.imgur.com/vw20Dbr.jpeg]image [https://i.imgur.com/vzZcVNv.jpeg]image [https://i.imgur.com/wemVYsi.jpeg]Simon Sadistic vs Knight Devil
This is just stupid fun. If you like this, then there's more for future dates. In the mean time check out:
The New Breed Chronicles: Crucible | Royal Road
and
Tom Wrath's Fictions | Royal Road
Now I need to get 500 words or more to publish this, so I'm including some of New Breed Chronicles: Crucible...
CHAPTER 1
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Rico ran, knowing his life depended on his tiring legs. He looked over his shoulder, knocking branches and vines away as he ran. He pointed the AK47 over his shoulder and it shook as he blindly fired a burst.
He heard a screaming in the distant darkness and ran into a tree, crashing back to the ground. He leaped to his feet, his face bleeding and his nose hurting. Where the hell was he now? Everything looked the same in the night of the jungle. He could hear the river flowing in the distance but couldn’t fathom what direction it was coming from.
‘Fuck it. It doesn’t fucking matter. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The monster is gonna get me.’
There was another scream in the jungle and Rico began to cry. He could hardly move for a minute. The scream in the distance rose to a higher pitch and it energized the bandit into motion. He ran away from the scream and careened through the undergrowth.
They’re all dead. All the guys are dead. And after all the loot we scored!. Oh Jesus!
He smashed through one more layer of leaves and found, to his dismay, that he had come full circle. He was standing on the bank of the river, the river boat was beached to his right, decorated with the entrails of his friends. Paco’s head was slowly bobbing away in the current of the river.
There was a crack in the underbrush behind him and he turned and fired, discharging every last round in the magazine.
‘Fuck off! I’ll fucking kill you.’
He wrestled for another magazine in his pockets, crying freely with terror, feeling urine spread across his pants as the rustling thumping noise grew closer through the vegetation.
With a gasp of excitement, he slammed the new magazine into the gun, racked a new round and raised the gun, certain that he would now be okay.
Then he died.
CHAPTER 2
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This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
‘I can’t believe the place hasn’t been torn apart,’ Ardia gazed around the dingy room. Despite the fact that her English came out without a flaw, the flush in her cheeks betrayed her true emotions. Razmik also noted that she was careful to avoid eye contact. It was probable that there were tears hiding just behind those hard but beautiful eyes.
Razmik reverently picked up a mug that lay on its side on the dusty carpet and placed it carefully on the small table. His own hands betrayed a slight tremble. When he spoke, his English was just as flawless, though heavy with his Armenian accent. ‘They are all too afraid, Ardia. Afraid of me and… afraid of what happened here.’
Ardia just nodded. She said no more for a little while and simply eased her long and beautiful body around the room. Razmik could not comprehend this young woman’s appearance. She looked nothing like her mother had. She looked like a blonde Greek goddess, like Athena. But more beautiful.
‘Razmik, surely you don’t have time to waste here with me’, Ardia spoke with her back to him and her voice was shaking. She was more than just practicing her English now, if she were to speak Armenian then her voice would be cracking. ‘You have much more important things to be doing. I do appreciate it, Raz, I really do, but you don’t have to.’
Razmik wiped dust from a wall mirror with his sleeve and took a moment to observe the old, rugged face that looked back at him. Not bad at all for a man in the neighborhood of 60 years old.
‘Ardia, I am invested in what happened here. I cared for you mother. Unless you need to be alone here, unless you tell me that you need to be alone here, then I will stay. Also… your mother was under my protection. This has made me seem…’
‘Weak?’ There was no accusation at all in her tone.
Razmik shrugged his big lean shoulders and said, ‘Or foolish…or… I don’t quite know the English word for it. This has created an opportunity for my enemies. Vulnerable! It has made me seem vulnerable.’
Ardia cocked an eyebrow, her eyes were glassy, ‘Vulnerable, Razmik?’
Razmik shrugged again. He was a consummate shrugger, always seeming not to care until the time came for decisions to be made and then he could act with absolute and terrible certainty.
Ardia turned back to the disheveled room. The furniture was scattered in chaos and there were still those awful brown splashes on the walls, splashes that had been red a few weeks ago. Staring at the aged blood and the dust and smelling the stale air, Ardia was suddenly overtaken with a feeling of despair.
‘We have waited too long, Raz, the trail must have gone cold by now.’
Razmik started to shrug but stopped himself and said, ‘This particular trail was so hot, to begin with, that I doubt much will have changed.’
‘Raz, don’t start babbling the same nonsense as the locals-’
Raz held up one solemn finger to stop her, ‘Let's not make up our minds just yet. Jumping to conclusions will not help us get satisfaction.’
Rage flashed across Ardia’s face, her voice rose into a hot roar and then collapsed into a broken sob, ‘Jump to conclusions! Jump to conclusions? How can you want to waste time pursuing the nonsense ramblings of these peasants? My mother is dead!’
Her fist flashed out and struck the wall. Not just the plaster turned to a cloud of dust beneath the force of her blow, but the mortar and brick splintered and cracked as well. She stared at the terrific damage she had just done to the wall of her dead mother’s house for a moment and then collapsed into a dusty armchair, sobbing.
Raz looked at the hole in the wall and his face was grim. Ardia had spent weeks in mourning, wondering why someone would kill her mother. It had yet to occur to her that the death of her mother might have had something to do with the beautiful daughter who could break gigantic men with her bare hands and smash holes in brick walls with her fists.
He turned his head to the crying goddess on the chair before him and reached out a tentative hand to place on her shoulder, then withdrew it, then extended it again. Before he could place it on her shaking arm the satellite phone at his waist erupted with sound.
Ardia spun to look at him, her face streaked with tears, ‘Is that…?’
Razmik shrugged, as usual, and lifted the blocky phone to his ear, ‘Yes?’
He wandered out through the front door of the house and Ardia followed him. Even though he stood several yards away from her she could hear every word that he said and could nearly make out the mumbled Armenian words on the phone.
In Armenian, Razmik said, ‘It is important because I said so. I do not care about the cost.’
Ardia looked out at the scattered houses that wound down the hillside. They were the homes of farmers and laborers, the homes of the peasants that had made outrageous claims about the killers.
‘We do not call her a whore! If you say so again then it will be the last you ever say!’ Raz’s voice was strained with anger, ‘Now tell me if you can get the footage!’
Ardia went back inside. This was a moment of peace within the house, without Raz. He wanted to help, and she truly wanted his help. He had been her mother’s employer for years when her mother had slept with men to make a living and later, when Ardia’s talents had been discovered, he had become her employer as well. Ardia’s mother had already been retired by then, kept in this little house on a stipend from Raz. And in this house, Ardia’s mother still kept her chest, the chest that Ardia had never been allowed to look into.
She crept into her mother’s bedroom, steering around the toppled furniture that had lain on the floor since her mother’s murder. She didn’t look at the browned blood on the walls this time. She stalked into the small bedroom, past the small bed, and found herself standing before the old wooden chest. There were secrets in here. This was where her mother had always kept her secrets. They were the secrets of a life that had driven her mother insane, secrets that had brought her mother to this town as a child with nothing, all alone. Secrets that had driven her to drugs and prostitution. Secrets that may very well have led to her murder almost sixty years after her arrival in these slums.
Ardia tentatively reached out and with a sharp twist broke the small padlock and then lifted the latch.
image [https://imgur.com/e6TojKA]