Dondun was a bandit, plain and simple, and he enjoyed raiding the farms surrounding the walled town, enjoyed burning the settlements and raping the unfortunates who lived there. Dondun did not care about the loot as much as he cared about the raping and the burning, and he usually traded his share of the loot for the few captives that others were willing to give up.

Dondun was busy digging in his nose with one index finger, his spear held negligently in the other hand, and daydreaming about the farm they had razed a few nights prior. He was reveling in the memory of the farmwife begging Dondun and the other bandits to spare her daughter, and her screams of horror as Dondun had ravaged the adolescent girl had driven him to new heights of lust.

"Say, have you seen an elf run by?" The growling voice yanked Dondun from his memory of the young girl's tears and the mother's screams. Before he could so much as blink at the sudden appearance of the figure clad in shining plate mail, a bright flash bisected his vision and then everything went dark.

"He's got pointy ears," Fraker finished, pulling his axe from where it had split open the bandit's skull and sent brains squirting out of the massive rent. The giant looked completely different than he had when he had lurched his way into the town of Gretlen, his armor repaired and polished, and the visorless helmet replaced with a barbute helm, which was closed face except for a T slit in the front. All that could be seen of Fraker's face was his bloodshot brown eyes that seemed to burn with an inner light.

Fraker flicked the axe, slinging away the blood and gore that had smeared its engraved steel, and checked the edge of the blade before using his shield to push aside a thorn bush and head deeper into the forest. Fraker was slightly irritated that they had cleaned the rust and blood from his armor. It had taken him nearly a decade to get the look he wanted, and now his armor was polished and gleaming, without dents, heavy rust or small pockmarks in it. Opponents would no longer be surprised to find out that the armor was heavily enchanted as they would have been if the armor still appeared on the edge of falling apart. At least he had been able to convince the servants to cover his shield in order to hide his heraldic device so that the bandits would not know who he was.

Still, Councilman Lomdus had meant well, and Fraker could appreciate the effort that had been put in to repair his armor. He understood that the Circle of Equals expected him to look like a hero out of the old tales, not the reality of the appearance Fraker preferred.

Fraker snorted in amusement as he pushed himself through another thorn bush, picturing in his mind the councilmember's reactions should they ever encounter the Blossom of Death in person, rather than paintings and statues. The feared undead general Gor DuMay was always depicted by artists as wearing immaculate armor, when in reality the dread knight preferred a set of rent and battered plate mail of a design nearly a thousand years out of date, with a hole in the side that revealed his age worn frame.

Muffled screams and whimpers led Fraker through a streppleberry thicket, the red berries leaving crimson streaks on his armor, and when the giant stepped from the thicket he could see two bandits sharing a wineskin and a woman at the same time. The woman's face was shining with tears, and one of the bandits had leaned his sheathed sword against her side, the hilt rocking back in forth in time with the woman as the two men abused her.

Without breaking stride Fraker swung his axe, the blow severing the neck of the first man, sending his head spinning into the bushes, while the axe continued to slice into the other man at nose level, cleaving free the upper half of his head. Fraker stomped on, ignoring the woman's screams as blood showered down onto her bruised skin, and she scrabbled up from where she had been on all fours. She stared at the still twitching nude and headless bodies of the men who had just been ravaging her and screamed in terror. Fraker just continued on, secure in the knowledge that the bandit's camp could not be too far away and the woman's screams would be causing confusion - if anyone even cared at all. He'd learned long ago that when female captives screamed, nobody really paid attention.

Pushing his way through another thicket, Fraker found his way blocked by a rude wooden palisade of logs lashed together with dried and sap soaked vines. Most of the logs were only as thick as a young boy's leg and when Fraker pushed, the whole section leaned inward.

Shaking his head, Fraker hefted his shield and raised his axe.

Some people shouldn't be allowed to build things.

* * * * *

Yalqua leaned back in his wicker chair and pushed his hips forward slightly, pulling the captive's hair as he did so. Between the sunlight, a belly full of food, a jug of potent wine and the forced ministrations of the young girl he had taken from Gulna, Yalqua was in a fine mood. Gulna was a little sulky, but the bandit knew that Yalqua could take whatever he wanted as the leader of the group. Yalqua was panting, getting close, and he closed his eyes to fully enjoy the sensation, the jealous glares of Gulna increasing Yalqua's pleasure.

A booming crash echoed through the bandit's camp . Yalqua bolted upright, the girl forgotten as he looked around wildly for the cause of the cries of alarm from the rest of the bandits.

Part of the palisade that the bandits had constructed had collapsed, and standing in front of the riotous greens of the thick forest was a figure in shining plate mail, a leather covered shield held up with one hand, and an axe held in the other hand. One bandit, an ugly fellow by the name of Rulg, charged the figure with a spear and was dispatched with an almost absent minded swing of the axe which hit Rulg just above the right ear and cleaved through to just below his left cheekbone. Rulg's body kept stumbling forward, past the armored figure, and collapsed in the grass as the figure took five huge strides into the encampment. Gulna left off glaring at Yalqua and disappeared further into the encampment, shouting the alarm.

"Have any of you seen an elf?" the figure bellowed. "He's got pointy ears and the last time I saw him he was holding onto his arse with both hands!"

Marget screamed and rushed the figure while he was still speaking, swinging his mace with all the power that Marget's massive form could bring to bear. Yalqua had seen Marget lift a horse on his shoulders, and fully expected to see the stranger crushed like an overripe melon.

Things didn't work like Yalqua had expected as the armored giant just stuck his axe straight out and let Marget impale his own neck on the spike jutting from the top. The stranger guided Marget's blood fountaining body away from him with a twist of the wrist and finished his question.

"I almost forgot, he runs really fast!" The giant's voice was a thunderous roar and Yalqua felt his manhood shrinking in fear. He pushed the girl away and dove for the engraved staff of black oak topped with the obsidian skull. It had been knocked down from where it had leaned against the wicker chair when Yalqua had bolted upright and was now by the girl.

Dunca the Ox charged the stranger from the left and Praul charged from the right, Dunca wielding a great maul in both hands and Praul holding tight to a spear. Yalqua watched, while his hands searched for the staff, as the stranger swept his shield in a short powerful arc that shattered the spear to flinders and caused Praul to run straight into the shield. Dunca swung the maul and the stranger lifted the axe up and let the maul's shaft strike the top of the axe blade just in front of the spike. Yalqua expected to see the axe torn from the stranger's grasp and the maul continue down to pulp the stranger's head. Instead the maul stopped dead and the stranger yanked it from Dunca's hands with a twist that dropped the maul to the matted grass of the bandit's camp.

Yalqua saw blood spray as Praul's face impacted on the shield with an audible crunching noise, and the intruder stepped away as he swept the shield back and threw Praul to the ground. Without missing a beat, he tripped Dunca so that the bandit landed face first on the ground.

Yalqua stared in shock as the stranger brought one foot down in the middle of Dunca's back and the sound of shattering ribs and spine crackled. The bandit jerked once, blood spraying from his mouth, and the stranger stepped over him and raised the axe again.

Fraker watched as the naked young girl kept pulling the ebony staff away from the man that Fraker had tentatively identified as the possible leader of the bandits. Any moment the half nude man would stop staring at Fraker and look down to see why he had not been able to grab the staff.

More bandits, six of them in all, charged Fraker, and he swept the shield into the one on the far left, shattering the man's arm and then his face as the power of Fraker's muscles caused the bandit's arm to fold up rather than stop the shield. A single axe swing split the face of one, the chest of another and hacked free the leg of a third. A spear glanced off of Fraker's breastplate, the steel leaf blade bending like putty, and Fraker pulled the shield back in line to block a hastily swung blade while his axe clashed with another axe. The head of the bandit's axe exploded into chunks of heated metal as the enchanted steel of Fraker's axe met with the poorly forged bandit weapon.

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Another step took him closer to the leader. The last two bandits fell to the ground, one of them screaming through a ruined face, the other falling to his knees and trying desperately to shove his spilling innards back into the gash the backhanded swing of the axe had opened up.

Shouts of alarm were filling the camp, but Fraker paid them no attention, his thudding footsteps carrying him toward the bandit leader with the ringing of spurs. The bandit leader was staring at Fraker with his mouth hanging open and panic flooding his eyes.

Yalqua could only stare as the behemoth that had exploded into the campsite bore down on him. Almost a dozen of his best men were down, some dead and others dying, but the blood spattered figure had dispatched them almost negligently, as if they were little more than vermin before him.

Panicked, Yalqua looked down to see where the staff had rolled to, and saw the child slave he had been enjoying moving it away from his hands. She was unable to pull it completely away from where he could grab it, but she had been able to keep it out of his hands while the steel clad giant had destroyed his minions.

"Stragurt!" Yalqua screamed at the pre-teen, grabbing the ebony staff and snatching it from her, feeling a tiny surge of joy at her cry of pain as the engravings on the staff sliced her palms and fingers. Yalqua leapt to his feet and faced the warrior, who had just finished dispatching another half dozen of Yalqua's men, one of them a man who claimed to have been a Red City Knight. The warrior had one foot on the former knight's leg and was working the head of the axe back and forth from where it was stuck in the dead man's breastplate.

Yalqua lifted the staff above his head and shouted out the words to activate the staff, and he began laughing as the eyes of the obsidian skull topping the black oak flashed a lurid purple light. With a crackling, tearing noise, one of the demons that Yalqua controlled through the staff appeared.

Its legs were that of a massive red scaled lizard attached to feet that were the cloven hoofs of a goat. Its dusky red skin was bare aside from where it was covered with leprous hair girding its waist and torso. Its massive gray genitalia hung down between its thickly muscled legs. Its steaming breath moved its massively muscled torso, great bat wings attached to its back flapped slowly, and a fanged jaw jutted from the scabrous head of a diseased ape. The creature was surrounded by grass burnt into charcoal and steaming coals where dirt had once been hidden, and it raised its fanged maw to the sky and began to bellow out a fearsome roar that Yalqua knew turned men's guts to water.

"Look out!" Yalqua shouted, pointing behind the demon, who ignored the words of its summoner to finish bellowing its war cry. The demon knew that nothing any mortal could bring against it created any type of danger to its fearsome hell born glory; it knew that even the sound of its voice could instill such fear that it would kill the pathetic insects that the current possessor of the staff sent it against.

With the sound of rock crunching in the jaws of a grinder, the man's axe crashed into the back of the demon's skull. Yalqua watched as the demon's bellow was suddenly silenced, the yellow eyes with cat-like pupils crossed, and a trickle of blood ran from its black and scabrous nostrils. It exhaled loudly and Yalqua was vaguely aware of the clotted snot and blood that spattered across the fine shirt he had taken off the back of a murdered merchant.

"Fraker?" the demon asked in a startled and somewhat disbelieving voice as the axe was yanked free.

The demon turned a deep, light drinking black, then suddenly crumbled, the ash blowing away in the light summer breeze and vanishing. Yalqua backpedaled as another bandit attempted to bring down the giant and the gleaming axe rose into the air again. The man swept aside Kullak as if the man was naught but an insect, the sound of Kullak's shattering bones insanely loud to Yalqua.

He threw the staff up to block the descending axe unthinkingly, the carved and inlaid black oak meeting the lead edge of that horrible axe. With a shower of sparks and thunderous detonation, the shaft burst. The force of the explosion sent shooting pains up Yalqua's arms and numbed his hands, the impact driving him back, and the axe swept down into the space where Yalqua's head had been a moment before. The wielder turned the blow, bringing the axe around to disembowel another of Yalqua's bandits, leaving that man standing on his tiptoes, screaming and holding onto his stomach as his intestines spilled onto the ground.

The symbol of Lorshani, Goddess of Destruction, Carnage and Battle, blazed with red light upon the man's breastplate, the sight of it filling Yalqua with terror as he tried to backpedal away from the advancing man. A small brown hand struck, snake quick, from beneath the wicker chair, latching onto Yalqua's ankle and causing him to fall backwards into the dirt.

"For the love of Droxx, please spare me!" Yalqua squealed as the axe came up again, obliterating the sun. Yalqua was desperate, invoking the Goddess of Life's name in a vain hope that she would intercede and save him from the wrath of a merciless stranger.

The axe came down on Yalqua's head. The small girl watched with savage satisfaction as the armored man kicked the corpse of the bandit leader off of the axe and turned to face several of the other bandits.

Fraker smiled inside his helmet, the heat of the combat causing sweat to run down his face, and he reveled in the feel of his muscles thrumming with power and the hammering of his own heartbeat. The constriction of his visibility was something Fraker had gotten used to over decades, and his eyes narrowed as he smiled again when a half score of bandits came into view.

Four of them had crossbows and the rest had short bows, all of them aimed straight at Fraker, and he knew that they expected the arrows and bolts to punch straight through his armor and turn him into a spinster's pin cushion. Another man stood behind the small group of archers, chanting in a booming voice and holding bloodied hands up to the sky while he entreated to the Gods to smite his enemy since he slaughtered a rat or a squirrel in their honor.

Losti the Blooddrinker watched as the armored stranger lifted his shield to help protect his eyes from the archers that clustered around him. Losti considered stopping his invocation of his God's power, but something about the man, the way he had casually slaughtered everyone who had faced him, how the rune dedicated to the Goddess of Slaughter burned upon his breastplate, all of it warned Losti that this was no ordinary mercenary, that this was something different and dangerous. Despite all of that, Losti was convinced that the unholy power of his master would be more than enough to deal with the man, no matter how large he was, if the arrows and crossbow bolts failed.

"Fire!" Hollak yelled, and Losti watched the missiles fly toward the steadily advancing man and had to repress a smile. Whoever the stranger thought he was, he was so much dead meat now.

The arrows and crossbow bolts hit the man's armor and shattered with sparks of arcane energy, and the monster inside that armor laughed mockingly as the last crossbow bolt shattered on his chest. The man hunched down and began running at the group of archers, his spurs ringing as his feet thudded against the ground. Three of the archers screamed and leaped aside seconds before the steel clad giant crashed into the group, knocking four men down with one sweep of his shield and his axe rising and falling to hew away limbs and lives in sprays of blood.

Losti backpedaled, his chant rising to a crescendo as he called upon Azreal, Lord of Hell, to smite down the man before him, calling upon infernal fire and hellish torments to destroy the foe who was hacking down the last of the men that Losti had been careful to keep between him and the giant.

With a roar, flame erupted from the ground, blackened skulls bursting up as well and swirling around the man, who simply reached forward with his shield arm, letting go of its handle to grab Losti by the front of his robes. Losti screamed as the giant jerked him off the ground, out of his sandals, and into the very hellfire that he had summoned. The fire surged with a roar, consuming the dying at the giant's feet and using tendrils of fiery agony to reach out and drag those who had scrambled out of the way of the giant's charge into the flames.

"Have you seen an elf?" the giant growled as the flames whirled around them and the skulls chattered obscene laughter. Losti's voice grew shrill as he screamed in agony from the flames burning away his flesh, causing the fat beneath the skin to pop and run, and the dark priest's hair to burst into flame.

"He has pointy ears," Fraker added, waiting a moment for an answer. When nothing but screams answered him, he threw the priest away, sending the burning and dying man crashing through the wall of a hut. "You're useless," he growled, looking around the encampment.

Another robed fool was standing less than ten yards away, watching the infernal fire whip around Fraker, his face creased with a victorious smile. Fraker wondered if the fool was unable to see Fraker standing unharmed in the flames, or if the idiot honestly thought that the fire would suddenly start to injure him.

Fraker stepped through the flames, batting away a fire blackened skull with his axe as if it was a dragonfly, and began stalking toward the robed man, whose expression went from victory to complete panic in the space of a heartbeat. Behind Fraker, the flames were feeding on the bodies of the dying archers, and claws were erupting from the ground to drag black shadows from within the burnt bodies into the charred dirt.

The man held up his hands as Fraker moved forward, beginning to chant, and Fraker snorted at the sight. No matter how many times a spellworm saw magic fail against him, the arcane infused idiots always seemed to think that their spell would affect him.

Fraker dropped his faithful axe into the belt loop as he got close to the dark priest, who was desperately trying to scrawl protective runes in the dirt with a stick, his bulging eyes staring at Fraker's helmet-concealed face.

One huge hand lashed out, grabbing the priest by the throat and lifting him off the ground. The priest's eyes bulged out even further as Fraker tightened his grip and brought him close enough that the priest could see the red of Fraker's bloodshot eyes.

"Have you seen an elf? He has eyes and hair and pointy ears," Fraker growled. "He might have run by holding his arse and screaming my name."

"No..." the spellworm rasped, clawing at Fraker's armor encased forearm and kicking his feet against Fraker's steel clad shins.

"Then you are of no use to me," Fraker told him, squeezing tightly. The man's face turned purple as his vertebrae shattered and Fraker dropped him to the ground to finish dying. The giant looked around, seeing nothing but a few miserable looking prisoners tied to some posts, and the child that had been hiding under the wicker chair, who was squatting over the dead bandit leader and relieving herself on the dead man's axe shattered face.

"That's it?" Fraker asked, slowly turning around. The gate to the brigand's camp was open and nobody seemed eager to cross weapons with him. "Some bandits they were," the giant snorted. "Back in my day there would have been at least five times the numbers these young punks had and they would have put up a better fight."

Shrugging disinterestedly, Fraker moved to cut the prisoners loose and see if the bandits had left behind any whiskey, and if any of the men or women he was about to free were interested in rewarding him personally.