Year 941,

As Melfis and Lyndabel faced off against the five Black-Goitered Mastiffs that had flanked them, Viryl glided forward, past the three beasts whose legs had been trapped by Lyndabel’s spell, to intercept the charge of the two hounds accompanying the Reaper Mantis.

He loaded two hemorrhagic fragmentation rounds into the drums of his rifles, and when he found a suitable line of fire, as he darted between the tree trunks of the forest, he fired both weapons. The rounds exploded into thousands of splinters before impact, riddling the flanks of the enemies, carving furrows that immediately began to bleed. Despite the copious bleeding, the two Mastiffs did not stop their charge, and attempted to converge on Viryl, who shot up above the crowns of the holm oaks, and almost blindly fired two more rounds into the branches. The shots hit again, and as the backs of the beasts began to drip blood, the two Ferenkelts looked at each other in dazed confusion, as if they were unable to track their prey above the canopy.

Viryl's evasive move did not catch the Reaper Mantis off guard, as it followed him with its gray, cannonball-sized eyes. With a flutter of its leathery wings, the giant insect leaped into the air and extended the blades at the ends of its forelegs in two lightning-fast slashes.

Viryl dropped down to dodge the insect's lashes, and he managed by the skin of his teeth. It was hard to track the movements of the sinuous appendages of the mantis just through the dim light of the glowing orb. The Ferenkelt was cold-blooded, and the reptilian vision spell could not help to identify its shape.

To get out of the Mantis’ range, Viryl dove into the brush on the ground, and the two Hounds immediately scented their prey. Despite the bleeding, the monsters didn't seem to have lost an ounce of their vitality. With a crisscross of their bites, they instantly attempted to mangle Viryl's torso, and he threw himself onto his back in the bed of vegetation to avoid them.

Viryl, between the beasts' legs, lifted two sharp stalagmites from the ground with his "rock shaping" spell to impale their bellies. The Hounds lowered their muzzles towards the ground trying to follow Viryl's legs, and collided with the rock horns rising out of the ground. The spikes crumbled under the beasts’ weight, as if they were made of clay. Viryl realized that without the addition of the hardening spell, the soft sandstone that constituted the substrate of the island was not enough to pierce the tough skin of the two beasts. But now it was too late to try again.

Shit , Viryl thought, and tried to scramble back to get his ankles out of the way of the Ferenkelts. The buzzing of the mantis' wings grew louder, and Viryl realized that the mastiffs' fangs would soon be the least of his worries. The knight pivoted on his knees and slipped between the canines' hind legs and tails, propelling himself with his levitation spell.

Ahead, past the trapped beasts and countless trees, he saw Melfis bashing with his mace the head of a hound that had lunged for his throat, while Lyndabel braced herself for another with her shield. His attention was drawn back again, by a strong blast of air. He turned, and a hot jet of Ferenkelt's blood hit him, seeping through his armor.

The mantis had swooped down on the exact spot where he had been standing moments before, crossing its sickles and then delivering two shear-like slashes. The attack had cut off the bodies of the two mastiffs and a dozen holm oaks, junipers and wild olive trees, and had traced two deep cross-shaped furrows among the shrubs on the ground.

Viryl sensed the mantis would lunge, and rose again, the forward thrust of the beast's scythes brushing him. Hovering over the beast's back, before it could raise its deadly appendages upward, Viryl used his advanced telekinesis spell to pick up three of the holm oak trunks that had been felled by the mantis's previous attack, strengthened them with his hardening spell, and aimed them to ram them into the creature's body. Before Viryl could land the attack, a chakram from the thicket struck him square in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, and then spun away. Viryl looked around for the thrower, and his reptilian vision identified a figure behind a bush of helichrysum a hundred yards ahead. The mantis, however, took advantage of the opportunity to impale him with the tip of its scythe, which pierced the ethereal armor from side to side at the level of his right hemithorax, and dragged him down, slamming him to the ground.

Viryl’s lung had been punctured, and the taste of blood rose instantly in his throat. His convulse breathing was aimless, and his body shook uncontrollably and did not respond to his commands. Hoping that another scythe would not come to finish him off, lying prone on the ground, gritting his teeth, Viryl reached into his belt with his left hand for a second vial of cerulean infusion. Struggling with all his strength, he found it, uncorked it, raised the visor of his helmet, and gulped it down. The knight took the deepest breath his diaphragm could allow, and rolled over to raise his eyes to the sky and try to understand why the Reaper Mantis had stopped attacking him.

The beast writhed in spasms of pain, one of its two upper limbs severed, and the tattered stump was dripping with disgusting brown goo. The same goo stained Melfis's white, crimson-streaked helmet, as he swung his ethereal mace triumphantly beside the beast. Another chakram shot out from the depths of the forest, and with a swift swing of his weapon Melfis deflected it, bouncing it off and embedding it squarely in the center of the mantis's mesothorax. The knight then dramatically clenched his gloved hand to cast the “melt metal” spell on the chakram, and the Ferenkelt began swinging its last appendage even more wildly.

As the mantis thrashed, trying to pry the hot metal away from its burned exoskeleton, Melfis held out a hand to Viryl. “They knocked you out, buddy, huh?”

Viryl raised his whole body to grab it, and let Melfis pull him to his feet. The wound he had suffered was still far from healing, so the knight could only add in a faint voice, “An Infidel is attacking us from the forest…”

"Yes… not just any Infidel. They are chakram, Suljukian weapons," Melfis confirmed thoughtfully.

Wondering where Lyndabel had gone, Viryl leaned over Melfis’s massive torso and saw her. She was electrocuting the three hounds she had previously trapped with “earth sinking.” Purple arcs of electricity shot out of her left gauntlet, shaking the beasts into violent convulsions. White foam bubbled from the sides of their mouths, and their bodies emitted gray smoke.

While waiting for Lyndabel to do her work of extermination, Melfis enchanted his club with the freezing spell and swung it at the mantis's still-intact upper limb, freezing it instantly, and continued to strike until it shattered into pieces. As he kept pounding on the now defenseless beast, a pair of chakrams whizzed past Melfis, and he dodged them with an elegant swing of his torso, then resumed mangling the insect's abdominal segments, showing a certain perverse delight in squashing them one by one, being sprayed with viscera and jelly.

A beam of light arced over Melfis and Viryl’s heads, severing the mantis’s prothorax clean and ending its suffering. “Stop wasting time,” Lyndabel hissed haughtily, rejoining her companions with her left arm raised.

Viryl noticed that her right arm was hanging limply, and pointing to it asked, “What happened to you?”

“One of those dogs tried to snatch it from me. Luckily our League buddy had my back and bashed in its skull. Overzealous, perhaps, since he was about to bash me, too,” Lyndabel replied sarcastically.

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“All's well that ends well,” Melfis replied in his falsely innocent, submissive tone.

Viryl smiled and tried to reconcile them, “Yeah… I had a rough time too and I still have a half-collapsed lung, but thanks to you I got out of it.”

“You’ve been less careful than usual, Viryl. What’s the matter with you? I’m not going to bury you here,” Lyndabel scolded him.

“That's not true, I was doing just fine, if only that son of a bitch with that shitty round throwing weapon of his hadn't — ”

“How sweet! You two are such a cute couple!” Melfis interrupted him, trilling cheerfully, clasping his hands to his chest.

Lyndabel’s face flushed, and with her visor raised it was obvious to everyone. To cover it up, she took control of the conversation. “Speaking of that… son of a bitch. We’re not done here yet.”

“Yes,” Melfis confirmed gravely, his tone of voice instantly changing.

“Well, then, follow me,” Lyndabel invited them both and set off. With her sonic vision spell, she had perfectly located the large man hiding in the bushes.

When the infidel noticed that Lyndabel was heading directly toward him, he began to retreat. Yet there was something peculiar in his behavior. He could have fled quicker and tried to lose them, but instead he kept a modest distance, just enough to allow Lyndabel to follow. It was clear that he was trying to lure them into a trap.

As she made her way through the bushes, Lyndabel tried to raise her right arm and clench her fist. She succeeded. Then she rolled her shoulder joint, making it pop. It had healed. Viryl's breathing was almost back to normal, too. That brought a smile to her face. Whatever the intentions of the bastard she was tracking, he wasn't going to get away with it so easily.

The branches of a flourishing rosemary stump blocked Lyndabel's echoes for a moment, and as she passed it she saw that the infidel had begun to run. She signaled her companions to quicken their pace, and began to chase him, hastily pushing aside the branches that were blocking her path.

They jumped over a low cliff and then passed a clump of blackthorn and wild olive trees, and in the end the three knights found themselves in an area of shrubs and low vegetation, beyond which, on the crowns of tall holm oaks, the infidels had built a suspended camp. The man they had followed to the enemy outpost shouted something in the monotonous and gloglotting language of the Infidels, and then he clung to a rope, connected to a pulley, in turn connected to a counterweight, and was dragged into the air, between the high branches of the trees.

Lyndabel immediately noticed that several dozen archers had their sights set on them from their lookout posts.

Even though he didn't have as good a perception as Lyndabel, Melfis quickly grasped the situation and stated, “Well. This is about to turn real messy.”

The low grunts and snarls of several Ferenkelts reached their ears from the thick vegetation at the edge of the clearing. At the same time, a mustachioed Suljukian, in his traditional wide-brimmed robes and with a scimitar at his side, stepped forward on a wooden platform that jutted out from the clump of holm oaks toward the clearing where the three knights stood.

The Infidel was carrying with him, by the hair, a woman of pale complexion, probably of Kellerian origin. The strange individual leaned over the edge of the dais, and intoned a guttural and threatening speech, shaking his right fist, in that incomprehensible language of his.

“What the fuck is he talking about?” Viryl asked, confused. He didn’t understand why an enemy officer was trying to intimidate them in a language they couldn’t understand.

“Maybe he's giving a pep talk to his soldiers,” Lyndabel speculated, trying to find a rational explanation.

“I only understood 'teslìm,' which means surrender, and 'faiscè,' which means whore,” Melfis shrugged.

“Do you know the Ashalmazite language?” Viryl asked, somewhat surprised.

"Suljukian, to be precise. They gave us a briefing before we left, at the Yuthsenia headquarters. Just a couple of words that might really come in handy," Melfis explained.

With his obscure harangue over, the Infidel officer threw the woman down without warning, and Viryl lunged forward with his levitation spell to catch her. He snatched her just in time, and set her gently on the ground. Lyndabel and Melfis immediately ran to him.

“Could you look after her?” Viryl asked Lyndabel, and she nodded. She was the only one who knew defensive spells, so she was the one who had to defend any rescued civilians in battle.

Two Thorned Boars, four Black Goiter Mastiffs, and a Silk Fur Lynx emerged from the woods, and at the same time the archers began to unleash clouds of arrows on the three knights. Lyndabel reacted instantly and ducked, defending the helpless woman with her shield.

Melfis snarled and shook his fist at the sky as arrows bounced off his armor. “Fucking cowards! They think they’re smarter than us? I’ll show those pieces of shit!”

After his vocal outburst, the knight of Libertas snapped his fingers, and a pall of thick brown gas engulfed the suspended tents, then expanded downward, descending in evanescent rivulets of heavy smoke. A few more scattered arrows flew, there were retching sounds, and then all activity in the camp seemed to cease. Meanwhile, the Ferenkelts advanced across the clearing, pointing menacingly at the four humans.

Although Black Goiter Mastiffs were a new species to Viryl, having first encountered them on the island of Arvis, he was familiar with both Thorned Boars and Silk Fur Lynxes.

The lynx was certainly the most dangerous beast of the group. A nocturnal predator, with eyes adapted to twilight vision, it was therefore particularly sensitive to intense light sources.

The boars were large, fast, and could easily kill a human with their charges. However, they were timid creatures, easy to scare off. It was enough to pierce the thick layer of thorns that protected them and wound them even slightly to make them lose control.

As a first move, Viryl fired a blinding bullet into the face of the lynx that was advancing at the head of the pack, and as he expected, the beast started and went on the defensive with its eyes closed.

Before it could regain its sight, the beast would leap forward, roaring and trying to bite the enemy that had blinded it. This gave Viryl an opportunity to jump on its back and ride it, trying to direct its fury at one of the boars, which would then run like mad, hopefully hitting another of the beasts, thus causing a fight between giants.

As Viryl flew toward the lynx's back, an explosion followed by a boom lit up the night sky approximately a mile to the west, as if in response to the blinding bullet that had just been fired. Viryl was not distracted, and he grabbed tightly to the lynx's fur, which began to thrash and trot around to free itself. As planned, the lynx landed a deep scratch in the eye of a boar to its left, and the boar immediately responded by headbutting the lynx in the side, and fled aimlessly around the clearing. Viryl let go, and rose above to enjoy the spectacle.

As the Ferenkelts fought among themselves there was a new explosion, much closer than the first, at the edge of the clearing, followed by a ferocious cry, “Melfis Jawbreaker! I found you, damned bastard!”

The din was so loud that the beasts stopped jumping at each other’s throats and turned simultaneously toward the source of the sound.

Viryl also glanced toward the crater that had just formed. In the center of it, a small depression five or six yards in diameter, stood a knight of the Order of Libertas lit up by the glowing lapilli and burning grasses. At his feet were the charred remains of a dismembered Ferenkelt. The knight wore sleek, amber-colored ethereal armor with wide pauldrons, a hood of gold chainmail beneath which a scarlet mask could be glimpsed. It was Brombelt Hotcap, clearly out of himself and almost certainly looking for trouble.

Thirty-two years later, second day of Neviticus, 11:21 p.m., red-light district of Meridania,

The old blue-haired prostitute struggled to her feet, leaning on the chair behind the counter, and rubbed her swollen eye. Spitting from her toothless mouth, with all the wrinkles on her neck tense, she brayed, “I repeat, he isn't here, and even if he was, the answer would still be the same: go fuck yourself!”

“Do you care so little about your life, you miserable bitch?” Hammerless asked impatiently, so mad he was on the verge of sticking a nail into her throat.

“I know that you killed her… you lousy butchers. There's no point in continuing this farce, I don't know shit! If you want, you can disembowel me here, in this brothel, like you did to her! Do it in front of everyone if you have the balls! But no, you will follow me tomorrow morning, to my house, and then — ”

“Oh oh oh… bitch… you just needed to ask for that!” Hammerless sneered, as he materialized a long and thick steel nail.

In the waiting room there were muffled murmurs. Then the doors of the Greedy Temptations Club flew open, and the grave voice of Jawbreaker echoed in the hall, “Hammerless! Have you and Rustball already returned from the Grand Master's residence? There is no point in looking here, we have already checked — ”

Melfis stopped when he crossed the threshold of the reception and found his colleague about to deliver the fatal blow. Hammerless rolled his eyes, terribly annoyed by the interruption. The old knight exploded in a furious snarl, “Have you lost your mind, you idiot? Put your hands away immediately!”