“Look Olivia, I know we broke up a while ago, and I know why. But I just need someone to take care of him while I’m gone.” In Robin's hand, Fido was sitting on the grass outside of Olivia’s lawn.
“And if you don’t come back?”
“I will. It’s a simple posting, there’s nothing there that would be able to kill me. Maybe like one guy with a gun. Possibly two. I’m just there for a show of force.” Robin smiled. “So will you take care of him?”
Olivia looked down at Fido and smiled. “Fine. But don’t blame me if Zack does something to him.”
“Oh don’t worry. He likes kids.” RObin looked down and smiled fondly, ruffling the big golden retriever's ears as he did. He looked up and saw Olivia looking at him, sadly, and he smiled. “You know I wouldn’t leave unless I had to right?”
“I think that I do. But sometimes I wonder if you just like it.”
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I walked along the walls, an arrow already resting in my bow, just waiting for one of the Hunters to show their cowardly hides, and then they would die. Behind me, Muramasa was jogging to catch up to me, while strapping a sword onto his back. “What do you mean you were their leader?”
I sighed and turned to him. “The group I broke apart from, the one I had to fight my way through, the Sheriff, the Hunters work for him. I was the original Hunter, and eventually we began to gather more people, dangerous people. They became the hunters, and for a year, I was the leader of them. And then I left. I don’t know much about the way they work, but I do know that they try to capture people, not kill them. And they're dangerous.”
Muramasa grumbled something and then asked, “Do you know how many there are?”
“Anywhere between five to fifteen. This could be an easy fight, or you might all die.”
“You keep saying you. Won’t you die too?”
“I have no intention of dying mate. If it means using your team as a meat shield or a distraction so I can get away, then I’ll do it. And I don’t care if you threaten me. I’m easily one of the most dangerous men on this continent, let alone this city. So if you think you can fight me, go ahead. I’d like to see you try.”
The previously placid and calm expression on Muramasa’s face fell away, replaced with a look of total anger. “You got us into this mess archer. If you run I will kill you. I will find you, and I will watch you bleed. I will slice you open, vein by vein, and let the blood pool around you until you die. You will pass out from the pain long before you die. I will see to that.”
I cursed and drew an arrow, aiming, right past him, and directly at the face of an emerging hunter. The arrow went right through his ear, and he screamed in rage, though not so much pain. Despite the arrow having punched a new earring hole for him, he didn’t seem like it hurt too much.
Still screaming with rage, he drew the sword from his back, and sliced. I leaned backwards and the blade sliced over my shirt, cutting it in half, and then it hit my bow. The string made a hideous twanging noise as it snapped, and one of the halves of the once whole string launched upward, with the force of over fifty pounds, and smacked into my shoulder, gouging a hole there, but I was completely heedless of it.
Muramasa’s swing kept going, and I could see in his eyes that he fully intended to slice my bow in half but before the blade could touch the body of the bow, I reached out with one hand and grabbed it, both stopping the path of the blade with my hands, and twisting it up, removing the force it would exert on my fingers.
Nonetheless it still cut a gouge about half the depth of the one in my shoulder. With the blade still in my hands, I stepped forward, and wrenched my hand, tearing the blade out of his hands, and slicing another line of blood in my hand.
I stepped forward, and grabbed his shirt, ripping off a section of the bottom, and very slowly, and very deliberately, I tore it into a set of smaller strips, each of which I wound around my fingers, staunching the blood.
I turned away from him, and drew my revolver. As I did I felt a trickling sensation flowing down my hand, and cursed as I saw the gouge in my shoulder. It wrapped around the whole thing, and went nearly half an inch into my shoulder.
I grimaced as I pulled it out, not because it hurt, but because of the disgusting squelching sound it made. When I was done, clutched in my hand was a now red bowstring. I sighed and put it into my pocket, then stuck my now unstrung bow in my quiver. It stuck out a bit beyond the rest of the arrows on my back, but I didn’t pay very much attention to that.
Instead I strapped the ammo in the bag on my waist onto a bandolier on my wrist. It held maybe sixteen bullets, and I made sure that it wouldn’t go banging around and making noise. Cotton coated the outer rings that contained the bullets, and on top of that I had another strap of leather.
With this gun I had twenty four shots only. So if I missed I was screwed. I couldn’t afford to waste a single bullet, because it could very easily mean the difference between life and death. I very rarely miss, but I make a habit of not really using this gun to shoot people from afar.
And now I was going to. And not just ordinary people, armored people. I sighed, then turned to Muramasa who was still staring at me in shock. “Dude. Snap out of it. I need a knife of some kind.” He continued staring at me and I snapped. “Muramasa. Snap out of it now, or so help me I will blow your brains out right now. RIGHT NOW!” He jerked back and numbly pressed a knife into my hands. “Thank you.”
I grabbed the knife and promptly threw it directly at the face of one of the hunters coming towards us. The handle clanged against his skull, and he dropped his gun in surprise, then realized the arrows poking up over my shoulder. He scrambled to get his pistol, but just before he could grab it, I took an arrow out of my quiver and pressed it down into his chest.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He breathed out a sigh, and died, and I grinned to myself, grabbing the helmet off of his face, and sliding it over mine, then grabbing Muramasa’s knife. Lastly I grabbed the man’s rifle and ran to the edge of the building, found the fire escape, and began climbing down.
When I reached the bottom, the leader of the small group I’d been killing walked up to me and asked, “Well? Are they dead?”
“No. They’re not.” I grabbed the rifle and unloaded about ten bullets into his chest, then kicked his fallen body to the side and walked out to the rest of the group. There were six other people there, and all of them were scrambling to get their weapons.
The staccato sound of gunfire filled the air, and I just sprayed the gun in their general direction, swinging it from side to side and mowing down every single one of them. None of them had time to grab their weapons before they lay on the ground bleeding out.
Behind me I heard approaching growls, presumably from the Bleeder horde that surrounded us, so I ran further into the alleyway with the fire escape heading for the rope that Muramasa had thrown down for me and I started to climb it.
I made it about halfway up before disaster struck. I felt a sawing sensation in the rope and looked up to see Muramasa, his sword clutched in his teeth and a small knife slowly slicing the narrow fibers holding me up from the horde below.
He caught me looking and took the sword out of his hand, pausing his sawing for just a moment, and smiled at me mercilessly. “Sorry Robin. I can’t trust someone who says that they would use me and my team as a meat shield. It’s nothing personal.” He lifted the rest of the rope up, and me with it, and sliced. There was a moment of terrifying weightlessness and then I was falling.
Immediately, I began to react, faster than my eyes or even my thoughts could process what I was doing, I lopped one end of the rope around my hand, and pushed backwards, going into a backflip, hoping to make just that little bit of extra distance, and the second that my feet touched the wall behind me, I pushed off, and grabbed Muramsa’s knife with the other hand.
The rope had already fallen about halfway down to where I was, so I had maybe a second to do this. Without making any sort of noise, while in mid air, I threw the knife, and reached out with the hand that had been holding it, grabbing the sliced end of the rope.
The knife hit the wall, the hilt pointing upward and the rope landed on the hilt, jerking it downward, but not enough for the rope to fall off. And the rope of course was supporting me. I laughed incredulously, and looked up at Muramasa’s shocked face.
I grinned wildly, and started climbing up the rope moving like a spider, never having my hands or feet in one place for longer than a second. Almost immediately I was at the knife, and with a grimace, I pushed the rope off of the knife hilt, and reached out to grab it.
My hand caught the blade, only for a metallic clang to fill the air, as Muramasa swung downwards, cutting the blade in half.
Startled I didn’t react as I should have, instead of plunging the knife into the concrete, I instead grabbed the protruding edge of the knife. As aforementioned, I felt no pain, but I could feel the blood beginning to pour down my hand and making it highly slippery.
Atop of me, Muramasa growled, “I don’t care how many tricks and acrobatics you have, archer. I will feel your blood on my hands, just as I have felt the blood of countless others.”
I looked up and very quickly realized a solution. “Olivia!” I shouted. “You know me. You remember me don’t you! My name is Robin! You remember Fido!”
Olivia’s face appeared next to Muramasa’s on the wall, and she asked hesitantly, “Robin?”
“No. I’m Sparrow,” I said sarcastically. “Yes it’s Robin! You mind telling that maniac to stop trying to kill me?”
“I shot you though… You died…”
Muramasa plunged the sword down, trying to stab my head, but I leaned out of the way. “That is yet another reason to kill him. You say you killed him, and yet here he stands.”
“Are you out of your mind!? Am I eating people? No! I can talk! How many bleeders have you met that can talk!?”
Muramasa’s sword faltered for a moment, and then he plunged down once again. “I will not allow this man into our camp!”
The blade neared my head, and this time I knew for a fact that there was nothing I could do to stop it from hitting me, and killing me. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to run, and there was nothing I had that I could block it with.
I centered my vision around the point of the blade, and sighed. I’d managed to find her, I managed to make sure she was safe. I did what I could and that’s what matters.
And then the blade stopped less than a centimeter above my forehead. Just a little bit more and I would have been dead. I looked away from the blade to see Olivia holding Muramasa’s arms, stopping the blade from going down.
Olivia said to him softly, “I can vouch for this man. He’s a good one. He’s a kind man, and I guarantee that whatever he told you was a lie, or posturing to make you fear him. He wouldn’t leave us for dead.”
I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it with a quiet plop. Quiet as it was, Muramasa still heard it, and he said to me, “Got something to say, Robin?”
He somehow managed to fill my name with such loathing that it almost made me think that I’d met him before. Maybe he was one of the people where I was stationed. I shook my head, not trusting myself to say something stupid, and elected to think before I spoke.
Muramasa turned away seemingly satisfied, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t let the terrifyingly dangerous man with the sword who seemed hell bent on killing me have the last word. I opened my mouth and said, “Actually I did have something to say.”
I flexed my hands, and let go of the rope, planting my hands and feets on the wall, and I scrambled upward, grabbing the knife with one hand and sliding it into my teeth without a single falter in my movement. I reached the top before Muramasa had time to blink, leapt onto him, and tackled him to the ground, then spat the blade out. I whispered in his now ruined ear, “You have a really awful aim.”
He growled and shoved me off of him, the pure strength behind the movement sending me at least two feet into the air, and I twisted my back, landing sort of like a cat on all fours, with the knife I’d spat out in my right hand.
I sprang to my feet, and whirled, turning a hundred and eighty degrees, and sending the knife to thud into the helmet of another hunter. I turned to Olivia and said, “If you want to talk we should start now, we have less than ten minutes before at least thirty of those guys show up.” I watched the broken glass that covered Olivia’s shoulder slide off slowly, and for a moment they looked like tears. And then the moment was gone, and one of the glass pieces hit the floor and bounced landing at my feet.
I bent down to grab it, and a single drop of blood landed on the glass shard. I looked at my shoulder and frowned when I saw the bullet hole on it, and then I shrugged, and winced as the movement caused quite a bit of pain.
And then I realized what that meant and looked to Olivia, “What’s the strongest pain killer you have? I need it. Now.”