“Goddamn mutants!” Sadea growled. “I’ll kill you all!”

She put down the bottle she’d been pouring down her throat, took a wobbly step, and fell on her rump. Raksha rolled his eyes and drew upon the Conflagration’s strength, increasing the intensity of his aegis. Heat swirls roiled into existence in the air about his limbs. His senses snapped into heightened clarity, and the assailants swarming him from every direction seemed to start moving more slowly.

They wore ill-fitting dark green canvas ponchos. Yellow, bestial eyes—the obvious stigmata of mutation—blazed with murderlust from the shadowed depths of their hoods. Verminous tails trailed in their wake, and their legs terminated in clawed, furry pads instead of booted feet. The mutants were nearly as tall as he was, and they moved with a bestial speed and grace, inhuman strength evident in their wiry frames.

They bore daggers of sharpened bone in their fists. Green runes blazed down the lengths of their blades. Raksha had seen such sorcery before. If he’d held any doubts at all about the presence of a fruit from the Tree of Hearts, they were now gone. The Hunter was here, in spirit and influence if not in person.

Stepping protectively over Sadea, he drew Steelbreaker and cleaved the first mutant to reach him from crown to crotch. His backswing decapitated another. Raksha spun on his heel and lashed his sword through the torsos of a trio who’d thought to leap on him from behind.

He seized a flailing arm, attached to little more than a cloven head and shoulder, and whipped it into a hooded skull. The crisp crunch of shattering bone filled his ears.

One attacker got close enough to reach Raksha with his enchanted blade. Raksha aborted the mutant’s attempt at a kidney stab by kicking him in the face, catapulting his broken body into another cluster of his fellows.

“Hunter!” he roared. “Or Herne, whatever you call yourself! Come out and fight!”

Raksha sliced apart yet another of the mutants from hip to shoulder. Death throes spun an enchanted dagger from the grasp of nerveless hands. Raksha batted the enchanted weapon with the flat of Steelbreaker so forcefully that it burst apart into a shower of splinters. Four assailants charging at him fell, flayed from the waist up by razor sharp bone fragments.

The tide of mutants ceased, then. The murderlust roiling within their yellow eyes was now tempered with fear and uncertainty. Raksha swept Steelbreaker through the air, flicking off the dark, foul blood of their kind from its length.

“Who dies next?” he hissed. The mutants encircling him flinched and withdrew as he took a step forward. More bodies were swarming from the wall panels and ventilation shafts. The newcomers were clad in a motley of work coveralls and were smaller in stature, the stigmata of mutation absent—or at least less obvious—from their flesh. With makeshift weapons fashioned from tools or lengths of pipe in their fists, they fell on the nobles, shrieking with hatred.

So the mutants with enchanted blades were evidently the elite of those responsible for this uprising, with rebellious serfs making up the bulk of the numbers. Antonius’s claims of the megapolis being threatened now made sense. Raksha had seen hungry serfs attacking armed soldiers on many occasions, all with the same predictable outcome, since desperation and rage were no match for gun-lines. Given the right terrain and tactics, however, inhumanly strong and fast mutants with enchanted weapons would have decent odds of besting Hegemonic troopers.

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He took another step forward, raising his blade. Wiping out the enemy’s elite warriors right here and now would shatter this uprising, allowing Antonius to regain full control of Neo-Mizuru. That would only make eliminating the fruit’s influence easier.

Unless Antonius was tainted as well, a possibility Raksha could not dismiss, given the obvious and blatant way he had put Raksha and Sadea on display and exposed them to attack. Or Antonius could merely be a traitor, somehow seeking to undermine Leona through some labyrinthine political scheme. And Leona had her own angle to play, too. The presence of a Yagyu agent was proof of that in itself.

Or was that even a Yagyu agent? What if the woman called Rini were one of Antonius’s spies instead, her ominous words more misdirection than warning?

The whisper of breaking air cut through his thoughts. Raksha stepped back and snapped Steelbreaker around, deflecting a hurled dagger before it could punch into Sadea’s throat. The sorceress was still seated and mumbling incoherently.

“Pull yourself together, woman!” he snarled, but Sadea’s only response was a drunken wave and a few mumbled grunts.

The mutants now held their weapons in readiness for hurling, blades pinched between their thumbs and index fingers. After his last fight against the Hunter, Raksha didn’t want to find out if their enchanted daggers could penetrate his aegis. He took a deep breath.

And roared.

His aegis blasted forth in a titanic wave of sound, breaking the bodies of the closest mutants and tearing their weapons from their grasps. Those behind them were hurled off their feet.

One mutant remained standing amidst the tangle of groaning bodies, having weathered the Lion’s Roar with apparent ease. This one was slightly taller than the others, standing eye-to-eye with Raksha.

“So you have met Herne. I thought he was just being his usual deceitful self,” the mutant said in a voice that was unmistakably feminine. She pushed back her hood to reveal a surprisingly human face, with high cheekbones, a pale complexion, and short hair the color of faded steel. Blue, glowing body paint spiraled intricately across her temples and the sides of her jaw, before twirling down the length of her bare arms.

But the stigmata of mutation was obvious in her. The black sclera of her eyes filled them in their entirety, and like her stricken fellows, her legs ended in furred claws instead of feet. The tip of her tail hovered by her left shoulder.

“Well met, Raksha. You’re as formidable as he says. My name is Fiadh, devoted of Cernunnos the Green God,” she continued.

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“Sounds pretty heretical to me, calling anything else god besides, well, God.” Raksha adjusted his grip on Steelbreaker. She was obviously the mutants’ champion, and there could be no doubt she was formidable, perhaps even more so than the Hunter. But if he could slay or capture her, this entire fiasco could very well come to the swift, unceremonious end it deserved.

“Why do you serve these parasites, Raksha?” Fiadh demanded, waving her hand in a sweeping gesture that encompassed the nobles locked in battle against a horde of berserk serfs. “They sit atop a shining palace and feast past the point of gluttony, while those who feed them starve below. Where is the honor in that? Where is the compassion?”

Raksha growled. The mutant had just made a direct reference to the Ancient Code. The Hunter had probably given her that idea, given his disturbingly inexplicable knowledge of Raksha’s past and what was at the heart of his Warrior’s Pilgrimage.

“I have no compassion for mutants.” He raised his blade and assumed the sixty-seventh offensive stance of the Raging Claw. “And my honor is my business.”

Fiadh smiled. She spun two curved blades from the depths of her poncho and let her tail swing free, its end wrapped around a barbed spike. Green light blazed down her weapons, brighter and far more intense than that on the weapons of her inferiors. “Ah well, can’t say I didn’t try. I’d much rather just cut you to pieces immediately, but I’d get a earful from Herne if I did that.”

“Shut up. Fight.”

“Ha! My thoughts exactly! Now—“

Raksha charged, covering the distance before Fiadh could utter another word.