CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—ADVENTURERS AND SAVAGES
Shiro landed in the courtyard among panicked worshipers, orgy participants and every manner of slave and Yamu city goer present as they screamed and ran for safety, tripping and scrambling over one another like so many crabs inside a bucket.
Feeling no sympathy for these savages, he shoved a Yamu out of his way. The man crashed into a stack of vases and the wine within splashed about as he fell into a ragged heap.
As Shiro sprinted to the marble steps where Jessamine fought the human slave guards, a wall of the others approached him. He lunged, swinging his sword in a wide arc and taking three of them at once.
Their hot blood sprayed over him and he jumped to get out of the way of Razul and Debaku slamming into the guards with their blades. Limbs fell, cries echoed through the courtyard and shafts whistled passed Shiro’s ear.
He moved quickly, taking a zigzagging circuitous route to avoid the shafts as he made it up the marble steps before the portico, taking one slave guard in the back with his scimitar, then sliding across the tiles and striking another across the hip.
With the amount of death and blood on the tiles, he slipped and hit his knee. The Scorpion Guard who had almost been cut down not moments before lunged at Shiro and he raised his scimitar, blocking the blow.
“Stay your weapon!” Shiro cried, and the Scorpion took pause, then seemed to realize Shiro.
A slave guard cried out, swinging his machete toward Shiro in an overhanded strike. It was an easy block, but Shiro did not have to react, as the Scorpion longed forward and caught the slave’s wrist, then he slashed the guard across the stomach with his own machete gathered up from one of the dead guards Jessamine had felled.
Standing up, Shiro deflected two shafts that would have otherwise pierced him and the Scorpion from atop the wall and nearly slipped a second time in the pooling blood. “The archers!” he called.
Razul jumped, slicing a machete wielder across the top of the head while he used the man as a totem pole, his sandals pushing off of the already dead man’s shoulders.
He flipped frontwards, landing on his feet. He whirled about another attacker, missing him entirely as he ran toward the wall.
With the speed he had and his top-tier adventurer’s status, he was able to run up the wall where he caught the lip with one hand.
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Shiro darted toward the new wave of attackers coming from within the portico, their battle dress much different from the other guards. These men had on gold ornamentation and green and red feathers sprouting from their headdresses.
These “slaves” as Jessamine had called them were either privileged, or of a wholly other class then the others. Their weapons consisted of large double bladed knives shaped like slender leaves with a quick spade-like taper at the end.
Debaku came up beside Shiro and flicked his sword through their wrists and necks. He grunted slightly as he lunged in close and put a gruesome gash across one attacker’s chest while behind a blue light flared.
Jessamine reappeared behind this wall of flesh that was eager to die against their blades and cut them down with such speed the blood spray came across Shiro’s face hard enough to thrash him slightly.
He blinked.
Watching her cut them down as she hissed and moved about, almost like a dance of blades and death, put Shiro in awe. Next to Jessamine, they were all children playing at sticks.
A horn was blown somewhere nearby, a long call that implied desperation and a need for quick reaction. It was a battle horn.
Shiro glanced over his shoulder and found that Razul was finishing up with the archers on the walls as he pushed the last man off with one hand. He screamed, flailed wildly and hit the tiles below with a bone cracking crunch.
There were still some slaves present, but they quickly darted for cover in retreat, possibly to regroup with their fellows for a concerted push to kill them.
Men ran out of the darkened portico, though they had no weapons in their hands, so neither Shiro or Debaku reacted violently.
Jessamine, covered in blood, glanced at Shiro, a look of anger and determination on her face. Debaku was rather serene, as killing was nothing new to him and he seemed to care little for these men he had killed.
Razul laughed aloud, and cupping his hand to his mouth he called, “Then come and bring them!”
Shiro sighed, mostly out of displeasure for the entire situation as he looked at the Scorpion Guard they had rescued. He recognized the man. It was Jafa. “Hey,” he said. But Jafa didn’t look at him. “Hey!” He snapped his fingers and caught the swordsman’s gaze. “Where are the others?”
Jafa inhaled deeply and pointed into the portico without a word, a terrified look coming over his face as he swallowed visibly. The blood covering him from head to toe put an eerie cast over his sunken eyes—the eyes of fear.
“Then let us kill them all,” Jessamine said, her face a mask of… almost glee?
A figure appeared before them, darkened from the overhanging roof of the portico but backlit with orange-yellow lighting from within.
Shiro straightened and instinctually grasped at his hilt a little harder as the outline of the man stepping forth was tall, muscular and wore an ominous golden mask with plumes of feathers and human hair.
The mouth was a depiction of a snarling demon-like form with teeth like a monstrous-form river lizard.
“He looks powerful!” Razul called, and the sound of his sandaled feet landing in the courtyard from atop the wall came from behind.
Jessamine repositioned herself into a dancer’s pose, her sword held out, a razor sharp ward of magically enhanced steel.
“This one dies too.”